Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824-1955 9780804790598

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Jewish Pasts, German Fictions

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture ed i ted by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 Jonathan Skolnik

stan f ord u n iversit y press stanf o rd, calif o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. The publication of this book has been made possible through the generous support of the UMass Amherst Book Publication Subvention Program. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skolnik, Jonathan, 1967- author. Jewish pasts, German fictions : history, memory, and minority culture in Germany, 1824-1955 / Jonathan Skolnik. pages cm--(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-8607-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews in literature. 2. Jewish historical fiction, German--History and criticism. 3. German fiction--19th century--History and criticism. 4. German--20th century-History and criticism. 5. Collective memory and literature--Germany--History. 6. Sephardim in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. pt749.j4s56 2014 833.009'3529924--dc23 2013042647 isbn 978-0-8047-9059-8 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10.5/14 Galliard.

To my family . . .

Contents

Acknowledgments A Chronology of German-Jewish Historical Fiction Introduction: Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

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1

1. Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization: Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837)

23

2. “Who learns history from Heine?” Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840)

45

3. Minority Culture in the Age of the Nation: Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen (1837) Hermann Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden (1856–57) Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado (1867) Markus Lehmann’s Die Familie y Aguilar (1873) Alfred Nossig’s Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes (1906)

67

4. German Modernism and Jewish Memory: Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (1921) 105 5. “Where books are burned . . . ”: Jewish Memories of Inquisition and Expulsion in Nazi Germany and in Exile 147 Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez (1934) Hermann Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella (1936) Ernst Sommer’s Botschaft aus Granada (1937) Epilogue: Post-Holocaust Echoes

177

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Contents

Notes Bibliography Index

187 229 257

Acknowledgments

This book owes the greatest debt to my teacher Yosef Hayim ­Yerushalmi (z"l ), who set me on a long path to consider the meaning of historical fiction about Jewish history in the modern age. When I was a graduate student at Columbia University, his reference to an obscure novel published by a Jewish press in Nazi Germany in 1934 (Sinheimer’s Maria Nunnez) ignited my curiosity about the relation of historical fiction to the forms and contexts of Jewish historical memory. Since that time, a host of teachers, colleagues, friends, and institutions have offered generous support, guidance, inspiration, and encouragement, which has enabled me to complete this project. I am grateful to my colleagues in German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for all of their guidance and support: Sky ArndtBriggs, Barton Byg, Susan Cocalis, Andrew Donson, Sara Lennox, Robert ­Sullivan. Special thanks are due to Sigrid Bauschinger for her inspiration and encouragement, and for her helpful comments on Chapter 4. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; and especially want to thank Maria Soledad ­Barbon, ­Christine Ingraham, David Lenson, William M ­ oebius, ­Catherine ­Portugues, Bob Rothstein, and Amanda Seaman. I am grateful to my colleagues in Judaic and Near Eastern Studies: Aviva Ben-Ur, Jay Berkowitz, Shmuel Bolozky, Olga Gershenson, Susan Shapiro, and especially James Young. I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of History: Joyce Berkman, Jennifer Fronc, Jose Angel H ­ ernandez, ­Jennifer Heuer, Brian Ogilvie, and Jon Olsen. I am also fortunate to have enjoyed wonderful support and encouragement from the University of Massachusetts administrators and their programs. I would particularly like to thank Julie Candler Hayes and Joel Martin.

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Acknowledgments

Many friends and colleagues in the Five Colleges and AmherstNorthampton area have been a continued source of inspiration and support: Polina Barskova, Justin Cammy, Justin David, Lawrence Douglas, Lois Dubin, Catherine Epstein, Heidi Gilpin, Sean Gilsdorf, Jocelyne Kolb, Aaron Lansky, Karen Remmler, Christian Rogowski, Rachel Rubinstein, Jeff Wallen, Joel Westerdale. This project benefited from generous support from several institutions. The final research and writing of this book was made possible in part by funds granted through a Soslund Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The statements made and the views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author. I particularly would like to thank Jan Gross, Atina Grossmann, Krista Hegburg, and Jürgen ­Matthäus for their helpful discussions of my work. I am also grateful to Steven Feldman and the Emerging Scholars Program at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for expert support in the preparation of the manuscript and of the book proposal. I thank the Leo Baeck Institute for the generous research support provided by the Gerald Westheimer Career Development Fellowship. I am especially grateful to Frank Mecklenburg for his encouragement and guidance. A Kiev Judaica Collection Research Fellowship at the George Washington University afforded me the chance to research rare illustrated Heine editions. I am grateful to Brad Sabin Hill for his expert assistance. Many at Columbia University have greatly shaped the ideas at the core of this work, and many have since provided invaluable criticism that aided in the completion of this book. I thank Mark Anderson, Volker Berghahn, Beth Drenning, Andreas Huyssen, Rashid Khalidi, Gertrud Koch, Neil Levi, Dan Miron, Harro Müller, David Roskies, Michael Rothberg, Michael Stanislawski, Frank Stern, and Daniel ­Unowsky. I thank great friends and colleagues at the University of Oregon: Ken Calhoon, Esther Jacobsen-Tepfer, John McCole, ­Richard Stein, and Peter Warnek. I would like to offer particular thanks to David Ruderman and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where I spent a semester in the early stages of this project: Richard I. Cohen, Adam Sutcliffe, and Liliane Weissberg. Many colleagues in German Studies, History, Jewish Studies, and other fields have also provided generous criticism, support, and advice. I am grateful to Ted Bahr,

Acknowledgments

Fran Bernstein, Carolyn Betensky, Elliot Borenstein, Warren Breckman, Michael Brenner, Geoffrey Davis, Mark Gelber, Sharon Gillerman, Peter Gordon, Yael Halevi-Wise, Susannah H ­ eschel, M ­ arion Kaplan, Chana Kronfeld, Leslie Morris, David N. Myers, Thomas Pfau, Ritchie ­Robertson, Jeffrey Sammons, Astrid Schmetterling, Scott S ­pector, Nadia Valman, Till van Rahden, D ­ eborah Vietor-Engländer, and Ian Wallace. Jennifer Taylor deserves special thanks for helpful information about Ernst Sommer. Special thanks to Marje Schuetze-Coburn and Michaela Ullmann of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. I am very grateful to members of the German and Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University who provided helpful discussions of my work: Bill Donohue, Katja Garloff, Sander Gilman, Jeffrey Grossman, Martha Helfer, Michael G. Levine, Agnes Müller, Sander Gilman, Karina von Tippleskirch, and Kerry Wallach. I would like to express special gratitude to Jonathan Hess for his helpful feedback and encouragement. Many colleagues and friends in Germany, Austria, and France were a source of great encouragement and assistance as I conducted my research and developed my ideas. I thank Delphine Bechtel, Jürgen Bruhns, Petra Ernst, Justus Fetscher, Etienne François, Barbara Hahn, Johannes Heil, Klaus Hödl, Gerald Lamprecht, Inka Mülder-Bach, Karoline Ochse, Peter Schöttler, Eric Vieuille, Guido and Horst Wille, Ulrike Zoels-Offenberg. Thank you to colleagues from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.: Dorothee Brantz, Sonja Duempelmann, Cordula Grewe, Simone Lässig, David Lazar, Kelly McCullough, Christoph Mauch, Bernd Schäfer, and Richard Wetzell. I am especially grateful to friends and colleagues in Washington, D.C., and New Jersey for encouragement and inspiration: Arthur Allen, Todd Barman, Johanna Bockman, Leah Chang, Cecile Chen, Tom Ciocco, Natan and Vered Guttman, Barry Hartsfield, Ben and Lisa Leff, Masha and Rob Levy, Paul and Ira May, Ryan Naftulin, Marina Burul-Sir and Robert Sir, Kenichi Sugihara, Kenji Sugihara, Margaret Talbot, Gayle Wald, Bill Winstead, and Andrew Zimmermann. Thank you to Norris Pope, my expert editor at Stanford University Press. It has been a pleasure to work with him at every stage of this project. Thanks, too, to the other members of the Stanford University Press team: Thien Lam, Mariana Raykov, and Stacy Wagner. I am grateful to Andrew Frisardi for his expert editing of my manuscript. I alone

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am responsible for any remaining errors. Thanks to Todd Barman for his preparation of the index and to Kate Brown for proofreading. Thanks extending far beyond the word limit for which I have contracted with Stanford University Press are due to my family: Mark Belenky and Nina Raben, Ira Makovoz, Masha Makavoz and Vadim Goldin, Yelena Raben and Bill Hurst, the entire Acker and SkolnikAcker mishpohe, Ruth Kirschner and Mark Rosengarden, Barbara and Steve Kirschner, Leona (z"l ) and Phillip Kirschner (z"l ), Esther Skolnik (z"l ), Julie Skolnik, Tressa Fiore and Miri Skolnik, Lucia Young. A whole other chapter of thanks are due to my parents, Norma and Stanley Skolnik. I thank Tosha Skolnik and Sonia Skolnik for their inspiration, patience, and humor as their father wrote this book. And, finally, I thank Masha Belenky without whose insight, support, and love this book would never have been possible. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Writing Jewish History Between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 19:2 (May 1999): 101–26. Chapter 2 revises material published previously as “Heine and Haggadah: History, Narration, and Tradition in the Age of Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Renewing the Past, R ­ econfiguring Jewish Culture: From al-Andalus to the Haskalah, edited by Adam Sutcliffe and Ross Brann (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 213–24. A section of Chapter 3 was previously published as “Writing Jewish History in the Margins of the Weimar Classics: Minority Culture and National Identity in Germany, 1837–1873,” in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität, 1750– 1871, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 227–38. A portion of Chapter 5 was previously published as “Dissimilation and the Historical Novel: Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez,” Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute 33 (1998): 225–37. Portions from my chapter “The Strange Career of the Abarbanels from Heine to the Holocaust,” in Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination, edited by Yael Halevi-Wise (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 114–28, appear in Chapters 3 and 5. I thank Indiana University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Böhlau Verlag, Stanford University Press, and the Leo Baeck Institute respectively for permission to reuse this material in this book.

A Chronology of German-Jewish Historical Fiction

Selected works, with dates of initial publication and their translations into Hebrew: 1822–24 Heine begins work on Der Rabbi von Bacherach 1837

Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: Ein historischer Roman (first Hebrew translation, 1898); Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen (first Hebrew translation, 1859)

1840

Heinrich Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (first Hebrew translation, 1946)

1841

Eugen Rispart (I. A. Francolm), Die Kreuzfahrer und die Juden unter Richard Löwenherz (2nd ed., 1861, Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur; Hebrew translation, 1859)

1856–57 Hermann Reckendorf, Die Geheimnisse der Juden (first Hebrew translation, 1865; Hebrew adaptation by A. S. Friedberg, 1893–97) 1867

Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado: Geschichtlicher Roman aus der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Hebrew translation, 1876)

1873

Marcus Lehmann, Die Familie y Aguilar (Hebrew translation, 1895)

1906

Alfred Nossig, Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes

1907

Lion Feuchtwanger, dissertation on Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

1921

Else Lasker-Schüler, Der Wunderrabiner von Barcelona

1932–43 Lion Feuchtwanger, Josephus trilogy 1934

Hermann Sinsheimer, Maria Nunnez: Eine jüdische Überlieferung

xiii

xiv

Chronology of German-Jewish Historical Fiction

1936

Hermann Kesten, Ferdinand und Isabella

1937

“Gedenkausstellung Don Jizchaq Abravanel: Seine Welt, Sein Werk” exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin

1953

Leo Perutz, Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke

1955

Lion Feuchtwanger, Spanische Ballade (also known as Die Jüdin von Toledo)

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions

Introduction Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel In every age, alongside the obvious phenomenon of assimilation, we can notice the dissimilation which always accompanies it. Franz Rosenzweig (1922)1

If historical fiction is a staple of the national imagination, how might a minority relate to it? What does it mean for a minority to imagine its history in a majority language, as it seeks to integrate in an age of nationalism and embourgoisement? This book is a study of how ­German-Jewish novelists used images from the Jewish past, most notably from the Sephardic-Jewish past, to define their place in German culture and society. Building upon the work of Pierre Nora and Yosef H. ­Yerushalmi, I argue that Jewish historical fiction was a “realm of memory” (lieu de mémoire), a cultural form that functioned as a parallel, and indeed as a corrective to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing (Wissenschaft des Judentums).2 Jewish Pasts, German Fictions shows how, for German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century, for major authors like Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach as well as for “minority” authors like Ludwig Philippson, the Sephardic past came to represent both hopes for integration and fears about assimilation. For modernist German-Jewish writers from the 1890s to the 1920s, by contrast, Sephardic stories gave shape to their concerns with anti-Semitism and Zionism. Finally, this book shows how, after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists in Nazi Germany and in exile employed these very same images from the Sephardic past (Inquisition, expulsion, auto-da-fé) to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The term I use to describe this dynamic of minority memory is dissimilation, a term first coined by the German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig in a diary entry in 1922. Dissimilation is a response to a conventional view of German Jewry, which has long been defined in popular representations by the p ­ olemical

1

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Introduction

term assimilation. To integrate into German society, so the conventional view, Jews all too often paid the price of abandoning their heritage. The Jewish rush to enter mainstream culture life in Germany was a “negative integration,” a servile conformity which was unmasked as a tragic illusion by anti-Semitism and the Holocaust.3 In a 1934 illustration to the Passover Haggadah, by Arthur Szyk, the assimilated Jew is portrayed as the “wicked son” (Figure 1). In Syzk’s illustration, an image that is contiguous with racist anti-Semitic caricature, “­Jewish” features are legible beneath the German clothes: assimilation is a “­German fiction” which tries but fails to escape the “Jewish past.” By contrast, this book, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions, argues that the Jewish embrace of German-language culture also took on forms which encompassed a different relation between “Jewish past” and “German fiction,” one that makes necessary a different view of integration and acculturation. By imagining, indeed reinventing Jewish history through German-­language historical novels, German Jews asserted their own unique identity as they integrated into larger narratives of German and European history. If the conventional view portrays the Jewish contribution to German culture as something “beyond Judaism”—German Jews as the truest devotees of the ideal of Bildung and of the classical tradition of German “high” culture4—then an examination of GermanJewish popular culture leads us to a different conclusion. Dissimilation is the crystallization of a new form of Jewish identity and distinctiveness that occurs as part of the dynamic of acculturation and alongside the phenomenon of assimilation.5 In recent decades, many scholars of Jewish social and cultural history have kept the concept of assimilation at arm’s length, as they have addressed the question of the extent to which German-Jewish modernity represents a rupture with Jewish collective memory. As Yerushalmi posits in Zakhor, the project of secular Jewish history was a challenge to Jewish collective memory. The Wissenschaft des Judentums school in early nineteenth-century Germany, the first generation of modern Jewish historians, turned to the Jewish past with an Enlightenment zeal to demythologize. Yet curiously, from the very same milieu that produced this Jewish version of German historicism, a new genre arose: modern Jewish historical fiction. What meanings did these fictional Jewish histories—written in German and often published and

Figure 1. Arthur Szyk, The Four Sons (1934). The “wicked son” portrayed as an assimilated German. Image courtesy of The Robbins Family Collection. Reproduced with the cooperation of the Arthur Szyk Society. Burlingame, Calif., www.szyk.org.

4

Introduction

distributed by the same Jewish publishers and book clubs in that popularized the histories of Isaac Markus Jost and Heinrich Graetz in ­nineteenth-century Germany6—have in an age of secular historiography? What did it mean for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language in the age of modern nationalism? The answer, as I argue in this book, was the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. By integrating into German culture and society (i.e., writing German-language fiction), Jewish writers transformed rather than rejected the Jewish past. Dissimilation is fundamentally linked with historical memory. If, as Benedict A ­ nderson famously asserts, historical fiction is a literary genre par excellence of the nationalist imagination, forging new identities vertically across time and horizontally across space through modern print media, then the German-Jewish example shows how historical fiction also became a vehicle for minority self-definition.7 In the form of German historical fiction about Jewish history (even by authors with integrationist politics), the Jewish embrace of German culture was thus not an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory better termed dissimilation. Central to this new German-Jewish cultural memory and dissimilation was a notable fixation on the Sephardic-Jewish past. Related to the ways the nineteenth-century German Jews employed Moorishstyle synagogue architecture to define their integration into the v­ isual culture of German historicism while also asserting their religious and cultural distinctiveness,8 German-Jewish historical fiction centered on themes of convivencia (the flourishing of Jewish culture in Islamic Spain), conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion to project hopes for integration as well as fears of assimilation and anti-Semitism. In ­Jewish Pasts, German Fictions, I explore how major nineteenth-century German writers like Heinrich Heine (Der Rabbi von Bacherach [The Rabbi of Bacherach]) and Berthold Auerbach (Spinoza), and writers like Ludwig Philippson and Marcus Lehmann, who wrote in German for almost exclusively Jewish audiences, used the Spanish-Jewish past as a source for their self-understanding in German culture and society. One of my main arguments in Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is that Jewish writers in the nineteenth century established a vocabulary of historical symbols that became a source for Jewish cultural memory

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

as it faced the challenges of the twentieth century. The same historical symbols that served integrationist Jewish writers (whether of liberal or orthodox cast) in the nineteenth century became a source of cultural memory for writers reacting to the crises of Jewish identity in the ­Weimar and National Socialist eras. In Chapters 3 and 4, I recount how political Zionists like Alfred Nossig and cultural avant-gardists like Else Lasker-Schüler emulated and “rewrote” the works of Heine, Ludwig Philippson, and others to address a new, virulent anti-Semitism and the wish for a Jewish cultural renaissance: a new form of dissimilation. In Chapter 5, I argue that with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers such as Hermann Sinsheimer, Hermann Kesten, and Ernst Sommer were able to respond by using images from the Sephardic past. For Jewish writers in the 1930s, stories of Inquisition, expulsion, and auto-da-fé were now used to grapple with the Nazi attempt to remove Jews from German culture. As I detail in Chapter 5, by 1934 the National Socialists had adopted “dissimilation” as a programmatic word for their anti-Jewish campaign. For Jewish novelists, historical fiction became an important cultural and political resource with which to respond to Nazi persecution as well as to come to terms with the dashed dreams of nineteenth-century German Jewish writers.

Dissimilation and Assimilation In the 1930s, the Nazis’ campaign for their version of dissimilation unleashed a debate in the German-Jewish world. Jewish nationalists and Jewish integrationists criticized each other, while the National Socialists hounded all Jews. Historians of Jewish history adopted the term dissimilation in the meaning that the Nazis had given it, as Salo Wittmayer Baron did in A Social and Religious History of the Jews (1937),9 but the word also began to be used in a wider sense, as Jews, under the pressure of Nazi anti-Semitism, began to reconsider the terms of Jewish integration throughout history. Around 1990, perhaps after sufficient historical distance to the tragedy of the 1930s and 1940s had been reached, historians of German-Jewish history began to express discontent with the assimilation paradigm in the historiography, which was increasingly seen as outdated. David Sorkin and Shulamit

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Introduction

Volkov were influential historians who reached for new terms, as they turned their attention to the development of distinct minority spheres and dissimilar cultural practices that developed as part of the general phenomena of the acculturation and embourgoisement of the majority of Jews in nineteenth-century Germany. Sorkin and Volkov employed terms such as subculture and rediscovered dissimilation to describe the secularization of Jewish life and the creation of new forms of Jewish distinctiveness.10 The four-volume synthetic work edited by Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, shied away from assimilation as an analytic term in favor of the more neutral acculturation.11 David Sorkin’s article “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History” argued that assimilation, deeply encumbered by the 1930s polemics of Zionists versus integrationists was too ideologically laden to be analytically useful in conveying how German Jews fashioned themselves and interacted with their environment.12 It is in this spirit that the term dissimilation attracted the attention of contemporary scholars. Historians and scholars of Jewish literature and thought have used dissimilation in a number of ways, often not with reference to Franz Rosenzweig. (Historians also do not use dissimilation in the technical sense it has in the field of linguistics, that is, to describe the way sounds are changed to distinguish them from neighboring sounds within a word.) Dennis B. Klein used dissimilation in his critique of Peter Gay to describe the limits of Jewish integration in Central Europe and the self-conscious affirmation of cultural distinctiveness by a small but significant minority of Jews.13 Shulamit Volkov first employed the term to describe the dynamics at work in assimilation as an ongoing process, with immigrant Eastern Jews reminding German Jews of their own status as relative newcomers on the assimilation ladder.14 Volkov then expanded her use of dissimilation, as a term relative to assimilation, to connote the fluid synthesis of integration and isolation that characterized Jewish life in nineteenth-century Germany.15 Some writers have used dissimilation in Volkov’s earlier sense to illustrate how German and eastern European Jews participated in a Jewish cultural renaissance in the years before and after World War I. For example, Gavriel Rosenfeld uses the term in his study of art criticism in the journal Ost

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

und West; and Ritchie Robertson uses the concept, in his consummate study The Jewish Question in German Literature, as an organizing ­rubric for a broad historical phase in Jewish literature, for works influenced by cultural Zionism and the encounter with Ostjuden.16 Franz Rosenzweig’s use of dissimilation, as introduced in his diary entry of April 3, 1922, posits a permanent, transhistorical dynamic in the history of the Jews that nonetheless belongs to a concrete historical moment. Stéphane Mosès explains Rosenzweig’s use of the term as both a dialectic of identity construction located at the rift between differing notions of historical experience (Jewish vs. Western-Christian) and a movement that signifies a “withdrawal from Western civilization and return to the sources of Jewish identity.”17 For Rosenzweig, dissimilation is a countermovement that accompanies assimilation. The crucial distinction is that it is a conscious step in the affirmation of a Jewish identity. In Jewish Pasts, German Fictions, I use dissimilation in the dual sense that Franz Rosenzweig intended it. On the one hand, I argue that Jewish historical fiction is indeed a dialectic between Jewish historical narratives and Western, secular notions of historical time, a perennial dynamic of the Jewish encounter with other cultures, but one that experienced a greater tension in an era of emerging ideas of the nation. On the other hand, in the five chapters that follow, I show how dissimilation took different forms at specific historical junctures. At each stage, Jewish historical fiction was an articulation of Jewish identity in response to the non-Jewish environment. In Chapter 1, I examine one of the earliest modern Jewish historical novels in a Western language, whose subject—Baruch Spinoza—is paradigmatic for the Jewish encounter with modernity. In Berthold Auerbach’s hands, dissimilation is a Jewish response to a demand for radical assimilation, a secularization that erases Jewish identity. Jewish historical fiction is the secular culture that articulates Jewish difference. This created a model which later writers follow, as they create a German-language minority culture. In Chapter 3, I focus on these German-Jewish “minority” writers including Ludwig Philippson, Marcus Lehmann, and Hermann Reckendorf in order to elucidate the meaning of dissimilation in an age of emerging national culture and Jewish embourgoisement. For these midnineteenth century writers, Jewish popular novels on Sephardic themes

7

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Introduction

projected nineteenth-century European conceptions of religion, family, and politics backward into Jewish history as a means to give historical legitimacy to various shades of integrationist Jewish identities (Reform, neo-Orthodox). Dissimilation was, as Rosenzweig saw it, the flipside of assimilation, a crystallization of Jewish identity in tandem with the formation of new German identities. By the later nineteenth-century, however, as the anniversary of 1492 was commemorated in 1892, the ambitions of the integrationist form of dissimilation began to give way to an understanding of dissimilation as estrangement from European culture in the sense of political and cultural Zionism, as a response to anti-Semitism. In Chapter 3, I show the work of the German-language writer Alfred Nossig to be just such a response, as I also explore the translations and adaptations of German-language novels from the mid-nineteenth century into Hebrew and Yiddish in the later nineteenth century,18 illustrating the transformation of minority culture into national culture, something that moves beyond dissimilation. Dissimilation, drawing upon its meaning in linguistics, is of course always fundamentally bound up with language. The transposition of German-language minority culture into Hebrew-language national culture is one important case, and the search for a “Jewish” literary language in the context of the Jewish cultural renaissance of the Weimar years is another. In Chapter 4, I explore the modernist writer Else Lasker-Schüler’s 1921 novella Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (The Wonder-Working Rabbi of Barcelona). As a rewriting of Heine and Ludwig Philippson, Lasker-Schüler’s book is on one level a renewal of the tradition of German-Jewish Sephardism, a perceptive reinterpretation of minority cultural memory that speaks to the crisis of German Jews after World War I. Yet her modernist language experiments illustrate another level of dissimilation. Lasker-Schüler was one of the rare German-Jewish writers to engage on a literary level with the literarypolitical concerns of Hebrew and Yiddish modernists in 1920s Berlin, and my interpretation of Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona revises our view of her work: Lasker-Schüler was in no way a cryptic and individualistic poet but one whose modernist prose gives linguistic shape to dissimilation as the positive articulation of Jewish cultural (and historical) difference in German.

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

Finally, in Chapter 5, I illustrate how dissimilation was used as a strategy of political and cultural resistance in the 1930s when the National Socialists appropriated dissimilation as a designation for their wish to remove Jews from German society. Jewish writers returned to the genre of historical fiction and to the models of earlier German-­Jewish writers to give voice to their own experience of a renewed Inquisition and expulsion, to honor previous generations of German-Jewish writers as they bitterly distanced themselves from their integrationist dreams, and to distinguish a specifically Jewish resistance to fascism. My present discussion of dissimilation comes at a time when some historians of Jewish history have taken a renewed interest in the concept of assimilation. Recent scholars, including Scott Spector and Till van Rahden, have argued for the relevance of assimilation as a term for historical agency, as a valid tool to describe the situational identity of Jews (and, by extension, other minorities).19 For Spector and van Rahden, assimilation connotes complex subjectivities, exposing the “subjective features at work between the general and the specific.”20 I understand dissimilation to describe essentially the same dynamic, but with an accent on those features of exchange and reinvention that distinguish a group identity, in dialogue with a majority culture. The way that this dialogue with majority culture is formed is illustrated very well in Moritz Oppenheim’s 1864 painting Felix ­MendelssohnBartholdy Plays for Goethe (Figure 2 and cover).21 In the painting, the young grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, whose parents added the nonJewish “Bartholdy” to his surname and converted him to Christianity, plays piano for the living giant of German Enlightenment and Romantic culture, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The young musician looks on in awe at the established polymath, eager for a sign of approval. Goethe sits with his back to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, gazing upward and away into higher regions. The painting and the statue in the background—which, like Goethe, also represent canonized, enshrined culture—also look away from Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. In the painting, narratives are created by the direction of the gazes. If we follow the searching dark eyes of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, we see an attempt to integrate through culture. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy yearns for validation in the form of a returned glance, a meeting of eyes. In Oppenheim’s painting, this validation eludes the seeker and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s

9

Figure 2. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Plays for Goethe (1864). Image courtesy of the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, on permanent loan from Alexander Tesler, Frankfurt. Photo: U. Seitz-Gray.

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

glance extends into the empty space to Goethe’s right. Another narrative is created by Goethe’s gaze. Goethe looks away from the pianist: he is indifferent to the physical appearance and, by extension, to the Jewish ancestry of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. He cares only for the music (presumably Bach). The message is that art, high culture, is open to all humanity. This, too, is a narrative of successful assimilation. In a benevolent way, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is invisible to Goethe. But the gaze of the viewer of the painting is directed against all of these views; we look at a sharp angle directly into the center of this scene, to the intersection of light and shadow at the corner of the window, from which we then turn our attention to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s eyes. What is essential for the viewer of the painting is that the Jewish relation to European culture is depicted by this German-Jewish artist as something constructed with reference to German high culture. The relation of narratives of Jewish history, in the form of popular novels directed both to general German readers and to exclusively German-Jewish readers, is a central feature of this book. Jewish Pasts, German Fictions thus contributes to a growing interest in Jewish “minority” writing in European languages. Although Jewish popular literature and culture still remains largely invisible to German literary history—an underused resource for exploring not only German-Jewish mentalities and social history but also broader patterns of European minority cultures in general—I am fortunate to say that since I began this project in the 1990s and first published articles on the novels of Auerbach, Philippson, Lehmann, and Sinsheimer, GermanJewish historical fiction has become a field that is no longer unknown and neglected. Nitsa Ben-Ari’s monograph Roman im ha-avar (published in Hebrew in 1997 and in German translation in 2006) focuses on German historical novels translated into Hebrew. Florian Krobb’s Kollektivautobiographien (2002) interprets a range of Jewish historical fiction with Sephardic themes. More recently, Jonathan Hess’s Middle­ brow Literature and the Making of Modern German-Jewish Identity (2010) examines Jewish historical fiction alongside other popular literary genres (romance, ghetto fiction) in the German-Jewish world, while in Inventing the Israelite (2009), Maurice Samuels illustrates the centrality of historical fiction in establishing new Jewish identities in nineteenth-century France.

11

12

Introduction

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions expands this work in a number of ways. One way concerns the relation of Jewish popular culture to German high culture. Jonathan Hess shows in an exemplary way how modern bourgeois Jews defined themselves as much through “middlebrow” popular culture as through Bildung and German high culture. My readings of Auerbach and Heine, as well as of Philippson and Leh­ mann, demonstrate that (like Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in Oppenheim’s painting) nineteenth-century Jewish writers consistently structured their narratives of Jewish history with an eye to canonical European texts. German Jews wrote their history “in the margins of the Weimar Classics,”22 both in the minority public sphere of Jewish publishing as well as in the mainstream German literary circles in which Auerbach and Heine moved. Jewish Pasts, German Fictions should contribute to a growing debate on the relation of Jewish acculturation and self-­definition to Bildung as “cultural capital.”23 The dialogue between “high,” “low,” and “middlebrow” cultural registers was a central aspect of Jewish dissimilation in nineteenth-century Germany, and continued to have meaning for twentieth-century German-Jewish writers as well. Another central argument of Jewish Pasts, German Fictions concerns cultural memory and its relation to history. What defines a “realm of memory” for Pierre Nora is that it consecrates symbolic manifestations of community in an age where collective memory (milieux de mémoire) is usurped by critical history. In Chapter 2, I locate such a dialectical response in Heine’s project for a Jewish historical novel, Der Rabbi von Bacherach. Heine, I will argue, had a profound awareness that the source-critical secular historiography of Leopold Zunz and the Wissenschaft des Judentums signified a rupture with traditional Jewish collective memory. I suggest that Heine’s plan for a Jewish novel that would combine the qualities he admired in Walter Scott and Cervantes’ Don Quixote was an attempt to reassemble a Jewish historical symbolism that resonated with both the aspirations and the anxieties of a minority negotiating the transition to modernity. In Jewish Pasts, German ­Fictions, I show that the forms of cultural memory which Heine crafted with his early novel continued to serve German-Jewish writers throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, into the Nazi years. This long historical scope necessarily means that I had to omit many works from consideration, including some of the best-known German-Jewish his-

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

torical novels, such as Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süß (Power) and Max Brod’s Reubeni: Fürst der Juden (Reubeni: Prince of the Jews), both published in 1925. But I hope that the gain will be that a central theme comes into view: German-Jewish Sephardism.

“Sephardic Supremacy” and German-Jewish Memory Which historical symbols struck a chord with German-Jewish writers as Western Jewry moved “out of the ghetto”? Both Auerbach and Heine situate their fictional narratives of Jewish history at the cusp of the modern era (1661 and 1489, respectively), and much of the drama revolves around a conflict between religious freethinking and traditional Judaism. As Richard Humphrey’s study of the historical novel notes, such a “time-conflict” is a defining characteristic of the genre.24 In the German-Jewish historical novel, the conflict between what is seen as “advanced” or “backward” is often grafted onto a contrast between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. In Auerbach’s novel, as his son begins to learn Latin with a non-Jewish teacher, the elder Spinoza’s fears are allayed by a Portuguese-Jewish doctor who contrasts their openness to secular culture with the “darkness” of unenlightened Polish Jews. In Heine’s fragment, regardless of whether the Spanish-educated Ashkenazic “Rabbi Abraham” or the godless Spanish-Jewish gallant “Don Isaak Abarbanel” is seen as the hero, both are “enlightened” contrasts to Heine’s satiric portrayal of the “debased” denizens of the ghettos of Ashkenaz. The historian Ismar Schorsch has argued that these historical novels contributed to a prevalent “myth of Sephardic supremacy,” an identification of early nineteenth-century German Jews with a Spanish-Jewish ideal of integration and cultural achievement. This German-Jewish identification with Sephardic traditions found expression in the use of Moorish style for synagogal architecture (Figures 3 and 4), in the adoption of Sephardic models for religious education and liturgy, and had a profound influence on German-Jewish historical thought (Wissenschaft des Judentums). In addition, Schorsch demonstrates how German-Jewish popular literature disseminated this identification, presenting German-Jewish audiences with fictional tales

13

Figure 3. Berlin’s Neue Synagogue (1854), the pinnacle of Moorish style. Richard Karlovich Zommer (1866–39), Die Berliner Synagoge in der Oranienburger Straße. Available at http:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Karlovich_Zommer_Synagoge_Berlin.jpg.

Figure 4. Moorish style and German-Jewish modernity. The interior of Berlin’s Neue Synagogue, with a modern, liberal service underway during the 1866 dedication ceremony. “Opening of the New Jewish Synagoge, Berlin.” Woodcut with color added from Illustrated London News, September 22, 1866. © Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum.

16

Introduction

that highlighted what distinguished them from eastern European Jews (Ostjuden) and, more strikingly, from their own German-Jewish past, in their quest for acceptance in modern German society. Although the “ghetto stories” of writers like Karl Emil Franzos and Leopold Kompert, which portrayed the pious customs and folkways of German Jewry’s recent past, enjoyed a great popularity with both Jewish and non-Jewish readers in nineteenth-century Germany (and found an even more popular pendant in the later paintings of Moritz Oppenheim) German-Jewish authors of historical fiction had a pronounced attraction for chapters of Sephardic-Jewish history, even if they did not share Ludwig Philippson’s programmatic hostility to the genre of the “ghetto story.”25 The novels which I will analyze in Jewish Pasts, German Fictions revolve around Sephardic settings. The Sephardic theme was certainly not the only theme which fired the imagination of GermanJewish historical novelists (the Thirty Years’ War and biographies of rabbis were also popular subjects), but it was by far the most prevalent. Heine’s fictional character “Don Isaak Abarbanel” may have only his name in common with the historical Don Isaac Abravanel (1437– 1508), a Bible commentator and financier to Ferdinand and I­ sabella, but H ­ eine’s character stands at the beginning of a long tradition of representing Abravanel in German-Jewish historical fiction. From ­Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen (The Marranos), the serialized novella which appeared in the first issues of the Allgemeine Zeitung des ­Judentums in 1837, through Reckendorf’s 1856 novel, Alfred Nossig’s 1906 historical drama, Hermann Kesten’s 1936 novel written in exile in Amsterdam, and, finally, Leo Perutz’s post-Holocaust historical novel, Isaac Abravanel appears again and again. Sephardic symbols were central to German-Jewish cultural memory. Schorsch and other scholars have focused on distinct moments at work in the German-Jewish appropriation of the Sephardic legacy. On the one hand, and this is Schorsch’s main point, the German-Jewish identification with the golden age of Iberian Jewry was an identification with its traditions of religious rationalism, with the religious thought of Maimonides, Jehuda Halevi, and Isaac Abravanel. This German-Jewish Sephardism has its origins in the Haskalah in the late eighteenth century.26

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

At the same time, Schorsch recognizes another element at work in the German-Jewish interest in Spanish Jewry, which he characterizes as the general “Romantic fascination with Spain in Europe and America in the first half of the nineteenth century.”27 It is this aspect which needs to be elaborated in order to more fully understand the meaning of Sephardic symbolism for German-Jewish cultural memory. Schorsch’s groundbreaking article stresses the “specifically Jewish reason” for Sephardism in modernizing Ashkenazic communities: the heritage of Sephardic religious rationalism which provided a genealogy for Jewish enlighteners and reformers, proof that Judaism and Western philosophy had interacted fruitfully in Islamic Spain and could do so once again in nineteenth-century Germany. It only strengthens Schorsch’s argument, however, to investigate the unique context of these inner-Jewish developments (which extends deeper into the past than the Romantic literature which Schorsch cites: Byron, Washington Irving, William Prescott). I wish to argue that it was through the Sephardic mystique that German Jews found a vehicle for dissimilation, a way to establish a new minority identity as past of a new national (and universal) narrative. When German-Jewish authors drew upon the Sephardic legacy, they entered into a symbolic dialogue with the emerging vocabulary of German cultural nationalism. Specifically, they invoked historical dramas of Goethe and Schiller, the dramatization of the Dutch struggle against the Spanish Habsburgs in Goethe’s Egmont and Schiller’s appeal for freedom of conscience in Don Carlos. In Sephardic history, in the travails of Jews under the Inquisition, Jews in the German-speaking countries could find a link to a German theme of liberal cultural nationalism that used the Spanish past as a foil for an ideal of modern, progressive values. Around 1800, the history of the Jews in Spain was invoked as a political argument by both supporters and opponents of the emancipation of the Jews. The debate which took place in the German-speaking lands in the early nineteenth century was in many ways an extension of the discussion in revolutionary France, where the prospect of granting French citizenship to the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Alsace and Lorraine faced more opposition than the emancipation of Sephardic Jews in southern France in 1790. In Germany, Schorsch notes how partisans of Jewish integration cited the example of Sephardic Jewry as proof that,

17

18

Introduction

given access to education, Jews could become model citizens.28 By contrast, in an 1815 pamphlet, Friedrich Rühs (1779–1820), the Berlin professor of ancient history whose anti-Jewish views provoked L ­ eopold Zunz to counter them through the Wissenschaft movement, used the Spanish-Jewish past to oppose rights for German Jews.29 In contrast to the liberal view held by both Jewish and Christian Enlighteners, which saw the “degraded” state of German and eastern European Jewry as the product of laws which restricted the Jews to certain occupations, Rühs saw the Sephardic experience as yet another case of what he perceived as Judaism’s unchanging, unassimilable nature. The contested nature of Spanish-Jewish symbolism in nineteenthcentury Germany can be highlighted even more dramatically by a comparison of two contemporary paintings, both depicting the same historical event. Led by Don Isaac Abravanel, a delegation of Jews appeals to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to rescind the edict of expulsion in 1492. The Grand Inquisitor Torquemada bursts in, crucifix in hand, declaring, “Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty pieces of silver, Your Highness would sell him anew for thirty thousand!”30 Both paintings are by non-Jewish artists,31 yet with very different political agendas. In the first (Figure 5), an anonymous engraving from 1869, the Gothic architecture of the court reinforces the clear Catholic-conservative message of the scene. Two diagonal lines clash. From the top left, the sunlight—heavy with Christian symbolism—connects King Ferdinand’s ornamental dagger with Torque­ mada’s hand, suggesting a divine sanction for the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims. The Jews are a faceless black mass in a colorful room of Christian art treasures, gazing at an oblique angle to the line of truth. An 1846 painting by Emanuel Leutze, The Mission of the Jews to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, presumably tells a different story. Leutze (1816–68), the German-American painter best known for his Washington Crossing the Delaware, was active in German liberal nationalist circles and close to von Schadow’s Düsseldorf Academy, where he spent much of the 1840s and 1850s.32 The Mission of the Jews to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella has unfortunately been lost, but contemporary descriptions confirm that Leutze’s image of Abravanel before Spain’s Catholic monarchs was similar “in setting and style” to an earlier work, Columbus Before the Queen (1843) (Figure  6).33

Figure 5. Mission of the Jews to Ferdinand and Isabella (1869). Anonymous engraving. Dark, faceless Jews and a sympathetic Torquemada. German-Jewish Sephardism opposed such images and aligned itself instead with liberals like Emmanuel Leutze. Reproduced by permission of The Granger Collection, New York.

Figure 6. Emanuel Leutze, Columbus Before the Queen (1843). Leutze’s lost painting Mission of the Jews to Ferdinand and Isabella (1844) is said to resemble this earlier one. Moorish (Islamic) architecture sets the stage for a liberal interpretation of Spanish history. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

20

Introduction

If, in  ­Leutze’s lost 1846 painting, Don Isaac Abravanel stands in the same heroic pose as Columbus does in the 1843 painting, then the minions of the Inquisition would thus represent the disparaged perspective, at odds with the privileged angle which shrouds the hero in light emanating from a cascade of Moorish-style arches. In their appropriation of Sephardic historical heroes and Islamic architectural elements for modern synagogues, German Jews thus aimed to connect with a German liberalism such as Leutze’s, which enshrined the persecution of the Spanish Jews alongside a celebration of German nationalism (as in Leutze’s 1848 painting Festival of German Unity) and a triumphalist view of American expansion (his 1861 Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way) as part of narrative of progress in world history.34 Sephardic-Jewish history offered German-Jewish writers rich and complex themes which could resonate well with their attempts to define new Jewish identities in the age of German ­nationalism. G ­ erman-Jewish integrationists could see the convivencia, the coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as a historical illustration of the German Enlightenment’s liberal fictions: as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) parable of the three rings come to life. The flourishing of Hebrew poetry in this “golden age,” as well as openness of Jewish thinkers to Greek philosophy (in the Arabic language) and the spectacular participation of Jews in Spanish in Portuguese political life became a model for what German Jews hoped German Bildung would bring them. Further evidence that the German-Jewish penchant for the Sephardic past could seek an appreciative echo from liberal German quarters is the work of an Orientalist and literary critic such as Richard Gosche (1824–89), a professor in Halle and member of the directing board of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (a society to promote Near Eastern studies), who lectured in Berlin on the Alhambra at a time when prominent synagogues in Budapest, Dresden, Stuttgart, and, soon, in Berlin’s Oranienburgerstraße were being constructed in evocation of the Alhambra’s style.35 A scholar of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and al-Ghazali’s poetry, Gosche exemplified an ethos that ­German-Jewish Sephardism aspired to, a harmonious fusion of German high culture, Enlightenment thought, and liberal Orientalism.36 Historical fiction about Sephardic history was the means by which German-Jewish writers inscribed themselves into this European histor-

Jewish Cultural Memory and the German Historical Novel

ical discourse. Dissimilation is the way that minority cultural memory took shape as it established its relation to German and European cultural narratives. Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is a historically comprehensive study of this process and contributes to our understanding of modern Jewish history and memory, to German history from the 1820s through the Holocaust, and to our understanding of minority cultures in the era of European nationalism.

21

O n e Jewish History

Under the Sign of Secularization Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837)

The Wandering Jew and Jewish History The literary figure which has longest served to represent “Jewish history” in the European mind is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Yet it was in rebellion against this image from the repertoire of Christian (and, later, anti-Semitic) legend that the modern Jewish historical novel emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany. Outwardly confident and full of hope, German-Jewish writers such as Berthold Auerbach (1812–82) responded to the Enlightenment project of secularization through the adaptation of secular literary forms which would recast Jewish identity for an agenda of integration and universalism in a new progressive age, countering an image of perpetual Jewish suffering as theologically justified punishment with a new conception of Jewish history. The image of the tormented and immortal Wandering Jew, however, seems both horrifying and appropriate to the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century imagination. In Siegfried Kracauer’s work on the philosophy of history, it is Ahasuerus who is said to exemplify the antinomies of historical time. In History: The Last Things Before the Last, the Wandering Jew stands for the sum total of all historical continuities, discontinuities, parallels, and nonsimultaneities, the irreconcilability of myriad human “shaped times” with chronological time.1 Kracauer’s Ahasuerus is a hideous and tragic image, a monster with multiple faces that reflect his turbulent travels, one who vainly attempts to construct his own history, “the one time he is doomed to incarnate,” from the jumble of possibilities. That the Wandering Jew could ever come to rest, reflect back upon his journeys, and disappear is, for Kracauer, un-

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Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization

thinkable, akin to the notion that history could have an end or that it might be “aesthetically redeemed” in a Proustian moment of transcendent reflection.2 In Kracauer’s view, the time conception implicit in the narrative strategies of Remembrance of Things Past is invalid for historiography: it presupposes a standpoint outside of time’s permanent flux which would allow the fragmented life to be ultimately revealed as a unified process. Kracauer’s suspicion of any aesthetization of history which privileges a stable notion of self is even stronger in his earlier attack on the subject-centered conception of history that informed the historical biographies popular during the Weimar Republic. 3 The historian Martin Jay notes the autobiographical echoes inherent in Kracauer’s attraction to the Wandering Jew motif: the “eternally extra­territorial” Ahasuerus appears to represent Kracauer himself as a ­German-Jewish “permanent exile.”4 But Kracauer’s figure of thought for the inability of the human mind to conceptually surmount historical time points to Jewish history’s dilemma as well. Still trapped in the form of the Wandering Jew, a literary image not of its own making, a Jewish history which cannot write itself free becomes emblematic of an unredeemed world. The enormity of twentieth-century upheaval and destruction confirms Kracauer’s tortured Ahasuerus as an adequate literary expression of unmasterable history, yet his Wandering Jew is itself an aesthetization of historical time, and it is implicitly an image of the Jew as eternal victim. Eschewing a constructed past, Kracauer’s Ahasuerus abandons the future to a timeless present unable to process historical trauma. Nineteenth-century German-Jewish writers could, by contrast, still impute utopian potential to aestheticized history and they did so in numerous historical novels. Kracauer, of course, was not the first to employ the Wandering Jew (in German der Ewige Jude, “the Eternal Jew”) as a symbol for historical time. In his monumental study of the Ahasuerus legend and its reception, George K. Anderson demonstrates that, by the late eighteenth century, the medieval tale of a Jewish shoemaker condemned to roam the earth as punishment for tormenting Jesus had become a figure for the nascent modern discipline of History.5 In the crucial “threshold era” (Sattelzeit), the century from 1750 to 1850 which marked the philosophical transition to modernity,6 Ahasuerus appears in many works as a chronicler, a narrator of history as world history

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

with a grasp of global geography which sets him apart from his literary predecessors. The melancholy wanderer as a marker of time within a worldview dominated by Christian salvation history had now become a literary perspective from which universal history could be recounted. Yet, in the early nineteenth century, the historiography of the Jewish people remained seemingly unaffected by the changing conceptual paradigms. Interest in Jewish history was still a by-product of theological motivations: for Jews, the establishment of religious authority and the normative interpretation of sacred texts and, for Christians, a concern with the eschatological implications of the fate of the Jewish people.7 Thus, when the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for Jewish Culture and Scholarship) was formed in Berlin in 1819, as the first attempt by a group of Jewish historians to lay the theoretical foundations of a modern Jewish historiography, the only available general histories of the Jews were partisan accounts by Christian writers.8 And in literary form, Jewish history was still presented in the figure of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. Although a novel such as George Croly’s Salathiel: A Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future (1827) could present the Wandering Jew as the personification of a forward-looking Enlightenment conception of history (Croly’s Wandering Jew heroically resists Roman tyranny in the battle for Jerusalem in 70 c.e. and, despite defeat, looks in anticipation to an open future which will bring such things as the discovery of America and the invention of printing),9 works like Gustav Pfizer’s poem “Der ewige Jude” (1831) still pointed skeptically to the continued degradations suffered by the Jewish people, symbolized by Ahasuerus.10 But in 1837 (or was it 1661?) the supposedly immortal Ahasuerus died unexpectedly. Of course, few took notice and the legend of the Wandering Jew continued as a productive myth for the modern age,11 but in Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza: Ein historischer Roman (Spinoza: A Historical Novel; 1837), Ahasuerus expires.12 Spinoza is a fictionalized account of the young philosopher’s intellectual development in Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter, spanning the years 1647–61. In the novel’s last scene, the sleeping Spinoza is visited by a vision of the Wandering Jew. After imploring God to rebuild Jerusalem, restore the Jews to their land, and “to give [him] a sword, that [he] might bathe in the blood [of his enemies],” Ahasuerus softens his rhetoric: “Or should

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Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization

the time come . . . when justice looks down from the heavens? . . . You have come to be a redeemer of humanity, and you shall redeem me, too. Your tribe has cast you out . . . and those not of your tribe have deceived you and turned your sweetest feelings bitter; [but] you know know resentment and you repay those who have cast you out with truth.”13 This speech to Spinoza, which is to be Ahasuerus’s final utterance, is the Wandering Jew’s first appearance in Auerbach’s novel. Auerbach’s Wandering Jew is meant to be seen as a thoroughly negative figure,14 embittered by centuries of persecution, unenlightened and debased (his German is ungrammatical, typical of negative Jewish figures in German literature), one who longs for vengeance and who understands the fulfillment of the messianic promise merely as the particularist national restoration of the Jewish people. As in Pfizer’s poem, the Wandering Jew stands for the Jews as a historical collective, schematically presented here as a pitiable and retrograde group in sore need of better treatment from without and moral improvement from within. The encounter with Spinoza—who is represented here as a paragon of a progressive, universalist spirit—proves fatal for ­Ahasuerus. The episode is a fantasy of Enlightenment triumphant. Auerbach mythologizes what the historian David Sorkin has termed the German-Jewish “ideology of emancipation,” the belief in a quid pro quo, in which equal rights were to issue forth from a reform of the supposedly backward moral and social condition of the Jewish people—their “civil improvement” (bürgerliche Verbesserung).15 The rationalization and denationalization of Judaism that were to accelerate Jewish integration in nineteenth-century Germany are played out in Auerbach’s Spinoza as a historic scene: the victory of the historical philosopher over a negative image engrained in myth. The death of the Wandering Jew in Auerbach’s historical novel marks the beginning of something new: the birth of a secular Jewish literature in a Western language. A review in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums praised Berthold Auerbach’s work as “the first Jewish novel.”16 The publication of Auerbach’s Spinoza in 1837 is one of many crucial starting points for a discontinuous tradition. Modern Jewish literature is born under the sign of secularization and, with the death of Ahasuerus, secularization (and its limits) becomes the theme of Auerbach’s historical novel. Auerbach’s Spinoza attempts to

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

liberate Jewish history from the theological paradigm through the dissolution of an anti-Jewish literary topos inherited from Christian legend. The rationalist philosopher Spinoza is identified as a secular Christ-figure whose critical thought can dispel centuries-old prejudices and superstitions. It is through the literary medium of the historical novel that nineteenth-century Jewish writers sought to achieve (to use ­Kracauer’s term) the “aesthetic redemption” of Jewish history, creating usable fictional pasts that would introduce a modern dynamic into their history, in the hope of finally laying the Wandering Jew to rest. Auerbach’s 1837 novel is emblematic of this simultaneous turn to both secular culture and the Jewish past, in order to further the project of Enlightenment and modernization.

The Historical Novel as a Paradigm for Modern Jewish Literature The final scene of Auerbach’s Spinoza is a testimony to a profound historical optimism, an unwavering faith in the promise of Enlightenment and emancipation. Yet the German-Jewish historical novel also bears witness to a deep sense of disappointment and even foreboding at the historical unfulfillment of these aspirations, and to an uneasiness about the implications of secularization. The political push for emancipation that sought a new conception of citizenship and nation based on universal values transcending religious difference finds an affirmative echo in Auerbach’s novel where the Wandering Jew proclaims Spinoza the secular redeemer. But the hopes generated by the 1812 Edikt betreffend die bürgerliche Verhältnisse der Juden in dem preußischen ­Staate (Edict Concerning the Civil Relations of the Jews in the Prussian State) had been put on hold in the reactionary atmosphere following the defeat of Napoleon. Conversion was the price of social advancement in the Biedermeier era,17 and, for a great number of liberal and radical thinkers in Vormärz Germany, the total cultural assimilation of the Jews was part and parcel of the democratic struggle.18 With cultural and religious questions at the heart of the political debate, literature acquired tremendous importance in the process of the integration and embourgeoisement of Jews in nineteenth-century Germany. The participation of Jews in German culture formed an essential part

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Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization

of a new German-Jewish identity,19 and contemporary observers such as David Honigmann hailed a socially conscious literature, Lessing above all, as “the champion of Jewish emancipation.”20 But Auerbach’s historical novel inaugurated a new phenomenon: a German-language secular Jewish literature, a minority culture which directly addressed the question of how Jews might enter German culture as Jews. Nineteenth-century Jewish society faced a crisis of secularization. As the Israeli scholar Dov Sadan has theorized, the great rupture brought about by the Enlightenment fragmented a unified Jewish culture into several “partial literatures”: the literature of the Haskalah, which eventually split between the new secular Hebrew- and Yiddish-language literatures; the religious writings of the Hasidim and their religious opponents, the Mitnagdim, and the emerging Jewish literature in European languages.21 For Sadan, German-language secular literature by Jews—his examples are Heine and Börne—represented the fluid border of a volatile Jewish society that did not see itself as a whole. Secular literature in non-Jewish languages threatened to go beyond the range of what might be classified, as Sadan intended, as part of a new national culture in embryo. The advent, however, of a secular literature by Jewish authors who renounced the theologically determined worldview, and who were no longer connected to a Jewish language,22 challenged intellectuals such as Berthold Auerbach to reinvent Jewish culture, to legitimize a new Jewish literature in a loshon am zar, a foreign language. Auerbach was exemplary of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish liberal ethos. Like Gabriel Riesser, he was a firm believer in the inner unity of the aims of German nationalism and Jewish emancipation.23 In fact, Auerbach turned to writing as a consequence of his political engagement: as a student he was thrown out of the University of Tübingen and incarcerated for displaying the German national colors, and his planned career as a rabbi was thus thwarted.24 The defining political issues for Jews in Vormärz Germany—the quest for a modern Jewish identity compatible with a secularizing society—are legible in Auerbach’s writings of the 1830s. Auerbach first addressed the question of secularization in an 1836 pamphlet Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur (Judaism and Recent Literature).25 The critic Wolfgang Menzel’s anti-Semitic attack on Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) as “Junges Palästina” (Young

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

Palestine) had deeply disturbed Auerbach, and Auerbach’s pamphlet sets out to show that the “unnatural sensualism” which Menzel attributes to Heine and Börne is incompatible with the spirit of Judaism.26 Auerbach recognized what the twentieth-century philosopher Nathan ­Rotenstreich noted about the ideology of secularization—that it “­elevates the present from an offshoot to an autonomous division of time to the level of an independent causative factor.”27 Auerbach’s response to the “rehabilitation of the flesh” promoted by a radical Enlightenment engaged in a “war of annihilation” against religion is thus a turn to historical thinking.28 Inspired by Idealist thought, Auerbach argues that Judaism is not based on fixed dogma, but was marked by development throughout its history. For Auerbach, this development was a progression toward the universal: from the denationalization of the messianic idea in the prophets to the “revealed deism” of Moses Mendelssohn.29 Auerbach’s thinking was in line with the nascent Reform movement in Judaism, and one of the movement’s chief representatives, Abraham Geiger, embraced him warmly as an ally.30 This model of historical thinking formed by three factors—a rejection of radical secularism, resistance to anti-Semitism, and a teleological understanding of “progress” in Jewish history—would inform Auerbach’s historical novel as well. The proclamation of Auerbach’s Spinoza as the “first Jewish novel” must not be understood narrowly as an absolute beginning point, but rather as a sign of a new phenomenon that would not have been possible a generation earlier. There had, of course, long been secular literature—fiction and nonfiction—written by and for Jews in various Jewish and non-Jewish languages.31 One need only mention here the often reprinted Bove-Buch, a popular Yiddish adventure story, the ­Yossipon, a Hebrew chronicle of postbiblical history, purportedly by Josephus, the German-language poems of the Minnesinger Süßkind von Trimberg, or the many adaptations and translations of chivalric romances into Yiddish.32 The first German-language Jewish newspaper, Sulamith, had appeared in 1806 and writers such as Heinrich Heine and Michael Beer were already established in the 1820s. A brief discussion of these writers’ early works will highlight the innovative features of Auerbach’s Spinoza and approach the problem of a genre-definition of a “GermanJewish historical novel.”

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Many standard interpretations equate “Jewish literature” with works by Jewish authors which contain “Jewish content.” 33 These readings often link a biographical approach with an analysis of content to arrive at an evaluation of the author’s “successful” or “unsuccessful” construction of an identity: “Jewish,” “German,” or something in-between. Thus, for example, Heine’s Almansor (1823) and Beer’s Der Paria (1826),34 both dramas with historical settings (the Christian conquest of Granada in the former and traditional ­Indian caste society in the latter) have been interpreted as attempts to give literary form to the problematic of Jewish integration in Germany while at the same time supposedly expressing the drive for total assimilation through an avoidance of presenting “Jewish values and history.”35 Auerbach himself rejected an equation of author and content. Defending Karl Gutzkow against Menzel’s attack on a “Jewish” Junges Deutschland, he asked rhetorically whether Gustav Pfizer was a Jew because of his Wandering Jew poem?36 An attempt to arrive at a theoretical definition of the “historical novel” yields a different approach. A century later, Alfred Döblin offered the maximum definition of the genre when he observed that all novels are, in a certain sense, historical novels, for even fairy tales rely on a referential understanding of how the world operates.37 However, if one understands “historical fiction” as literature which theorizes history as a process,38 the difference between Spinoza and the aforementioned historical dramas becomes apparent. What distinguishes Auerbach’s Spinoza is the introduction of historical thinking into Jewish culture, and, by extension, into debates about Jewish integration in Germany. Rather than using history as a backdrop, Auerbach’s Spinoza recognizes that a secular Jewish literature must confront the historical dynamic of secularization. The identification of author with protagonist, or of protagonist with “message” is also limiting. To be sure, there are factors which speak for a biographical reading of Auerbach’s historical novel Spinoza.39 In letters to his cousin, Auerbach makes clear his profound identification with the philosopher who also changed his name from “Baruch.”40 Yet to see Spinoza only as an identification-figure for Auerbach and to evaluate the fictional failure to find community as a political vision is to miss the ways in which Auerbach’s historical novel renegotiates these categories through the creation of a minority literature and a

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

literary exploration of the consequences of a desacralization of Jewish history.41 More than a “masked and wishful autobiography,”42 Auerbach’s historical novel presents Jewish and non-Jewish readers with the open-ended drama of modernization: a novel about the limits of communal acceptance in an incompletely secularized society, a novel which itself participates in the creation of a secular Jewish culture. The conditions that made this new secular literature possible become the themes of Auerbach’s Spinoza. Secularization and the critique of religion—central concepts transforming German thought in the wake of Hegel43—are established as dynamic forces within Auerbach’s novel, while, at the same time, the status and aspirations of a new Jewish literature are framed by his introduction. In the following, an analysis of how this first modern Jewish historical novel enacts the dynamic of secularization within Jewish history while simultaneously participating in the creation of a new Jewish literary sphere will follow a discussion of how Auerbach’s attempts to “position” his historical novel within the contemporary political and literary landscape illustrate the dilemma of a secular Jewish literature in German in the 1830s and beyond.

Constructing Jewish History Through Intertext: German-Jewish Identity Between Gutzkow and Goethe Auerbach’s Spinoza begins with the young philosopher attending the funeral of the apostate Uriel Acosta. To write a German-Jewish historical novel is to write German literary history as well as Jewish history, and here Auerbach’s text picks up the narrative thread of a literary precursor in order to define a space for a new German-Jewish minority culture. Uriel Acosta’s fate had been the subject of Karl Gutzkow’s 1834 novella Der Sadduzäer von Amsterdam (The Sadducee of Amsterdam).44 Gutzkow’s novella uses the historical background of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam to paint a romantic portrait of a freethinker. Gutzkow transforms Jewish history into a left-Hegelian melodrama: the bright young Acosta, from a family of converted Portuguese Jews, turns against Catholic dogma, returns to Judaism, and escapes to Holland. But the critical spirit awakened in rebellion

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against the Inquisition soon questions Jewish belief, as well. Acosta’s passion for Judith, the attractive daughter of a Jewish merchant, is thwarted when he is officially censured by the rabbis of Amsterdam and made an outcast. For love, Gutzkow’s Acosta accepts humiliation and recants his skepticism, but he is driven to suicide when Judith takes up with his friend Ben Jochai. Gutzkow’s treatment of Jewish characters in Der S­adduzäer von Amsterdam and in his subsequent novel Wally die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Doubter) prompted Menzel to color his attack on the latter’s “immoralism” with a dismissal of the author as somehow “Jewish,” yet it is against Gutzkow’s schematic vision of the historical forces shaping Jewish integration that Auerbach reacts in Spinoza. Gutzkow’s historical novella is informed by a historical imagination based on a simplistic opposition of the “modern” to the “premodern,” which can be gleaned from the description of Acosta’s entry into Judith’s father’s house: “The country house of the rich Jew Menasse Vanderstraten, built in the best style of that age, shimmered at them through shrubbery and avenues; in no time, they reached the drawbridge over the moat which surrounded the modern castle in a seemingly feudalistic way.”45 Here and in the description of Vanderstraten’s ornate garden, Gutzkow conflates a satire on nouveau riche taste with an attack on Jewish family and religious norms. The evocation of the medieval world in this scenario of unhappy love casts Acosta (on horseback no less) as an amorous knight. In Gutzkow’s tale, however, the knight’s quest is not for the glory of Christendom, but rather for Hegel’s Idealist world religion. In Acosta’s view, Judaism’s role ends early along this progressive historical continuum. Indeed, he believes (as does his author) that all religions should take off “the historical costume” of symbol and ceremony and find common cause in a search for truth which draws on Pythagoras, Moses, Socrates, and Jesus.46 Gutzkow’s rather wooden (although, in its dramatic version, rather successful) historical novella pits the secularized intellectual against a hostile society where rich Jewish merchants, ravishingly beautiful Jewesses, and reactionary rabbis close ranks against what is rational, clear, and true.47 It is a historical dynamic said to carry on eternally, and Der Sadduzäer von Amsterdam concludes with Acosta’s nephew Spinoza at his graveside, the next bearer of hope.

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

Yet more than simply an illustration, in good Enlightenment spirit, that clerical rigidity, whether Christian or Jewish, is an instrument of repression, Gutzkow’s text is a commentary on the “Jewish Question” in 1830s Germany. In accordance with the author’s understanding of historical fiction as “epic parallelism [epischer Parallelismus]”48—as an analogy for contemporary politics—Gutzkow’s narrator begins his tale by directly addressing a not-very-subtly implied German-speaking Jewish reader: Lucky Jews, who sought your asylum among Holland’s reclaimed lands and dikes! Have you ever in foreign lands enjoyed your Passover lamb in such peace . . . ? . . . Nowhere else did your chimneys smoulder so happily on Sabbath’s eve, only in Amsterdam did your men-folk wear such richly decorated robes, your women-folk such heavy gold chains and ear-rings. The Dutch feared neither your money, nor your beards, nor your beautiful daughters, nor Jehovah, who built splendid temples in their country and who was praised with candles, guttural tones, yes even with intolerant orthodox priests and Levites obsessed with heretics.49

Whereas Gutzkow’s Acosta reaches out to implied Jewish readers’ sense of humanism with the promise of a universal religion of truth whose only rite is Bildung, the narrator of Der Sadduzäer von Amsterdam reminds them that, unless they sign on, they are nothing more than the crass caricatures presented in the story: barely tolerated ostententatious exotics. In Gutzkow’s historical novella, Jewish history becomes a winnertake-all conflict between “universalism” and “particularism.” It is a battle which will flare up time and again in and around GermanJewish historical fiction. Indeed, it erupted anew in 1838 as Gutzkow and L ­ udwig Philippson, the founder of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, attacked each other in print over nothing other than the meaning of the literary figure of the Wandering Jew, the so-called “Ahasver-­Streit.”50 Gutzkow had reacted to a review in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt of Julius Mosen’s epic poem Ahasver, which criticized the work’s lack of “modernity” because it did not present civil emancipation as a remedy for the Wandering Jew’s plight. A truly modern Wandering Jew narrative, argued Gutzkow, would instead

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see tragedy in the continued existence of collective Jewish hopes, in Ahasuerus as the tragic embodiment of a Judaism that stubbornly refused to “self-destruct” and join humanity. Gutzkow’s polemic strikes at the heart of the Enlightenment debate in Germany. What are the implications of secularization for cultural and religious pluralism and what is to be deemed their adequate literary representation? Auerbach’s Spinoza stands in the shadow of Gutzkow’s Der ­Sadduzäer von Amsterdam, with its radical indictment of Jewish society. By beginning the ­German-Jewish historical novel as the productive continuation of Gutzkow’s tale, Auerbach confronts these questions directly. Yet the death of the Wandering Jew at the end of Auerbach’s novel (1837) predates the “Ahasver-Streit” (1838) and Gutzkow’s extreme formulation of his position on the Jewish Question. This philosophical and literary debate about the continued existence of Jewish “particularity” has a more extensive etiology which also bears directly upon Auerbach’s novel. The Spinoza controversy of the 1780s brought questions of the reconcilability of faith and reason to the forefront of philosophical discussion in Germany.51 When Lessing gave Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi a copy of Goethe’s poem “Prometheus,” Jacobi instigated a public debate with the aim of forcing Mendelssohn to confess or deny his “­Spinozism,” his support or repudiation of the pantheistic views Jacobi saw in the poem. Jacobi believed that atheism was the necessary result of rational criticism. But Mendelssohn saw much more than an attack on reason in the conservative philosopher’s polemic. For Mendelssohn, Jacobi’s challenge to publicly take a stand on the status of Christian faith was a recapitulation of the “Lavater affair,” simply another thinly-veiled attempt to force him into the uneasy alternative of conversion or subversion. In response to a charge of being a nonbeliever, Mendelssohn had to philosophically justify his continued allegiance to Jewish practice and he did so with resort to historical thinking, by redefining Judaism as “belief in historical truths, . . . revealed law.”52 Apologies for the continuing validity of Jewish beliefs, practices, and customs before both the secular court of reason and the ecclesiastical tribunal of Christianity would occupy Jewish thinkers throughout the nineteenth century,53 and all of them would use Mendelssohn’s historically argued religious positivism as a starting point.

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

It was Goethe’s poem which ignited the Spinoza controversy, and Goethe’s reflections on the affair in Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth; Goethe’s memoirs) set the stage for Auerbach’s response to secularization in the Jewish historical novel. In book 15 of his memoirs, Goethe discusses his plans for a never-completed work entitled Der ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew), which he set aside just as the Prometheus theme began to attract his attention.54 In the next chapter, Goethe gives an account of the philosophical scandal which erupted when Jacobi used “Prometheus” as a pretext to attack Mendelssohn. Book 16 of Goethe’s autobiography brings together several elements which must have become an important symbolic constellation for A ­ uerbach: Goethe contends that the explosive debate around his ­Spinoza reception actually cost Moses Mendelssohn his life, and he remarks in passing that he intended to demonstrate the significance of Spinoza in his own thought by including an encounter (never written) between the seventeenth-century philosopher and Ahasuerus in his unfinished Wandering Jew epic.55 The death of the Wandering Jew at the conclusion of Auerbach’s Spinoza elaborates an unfinished project of Goethe. Auerbach’s historical novel thus becomes a twofold means of integrating the text of Jewish history into German culture. In picking up the narrative thread of Gutzkow’s morality play on the necessity of an elimination of Jewish “particularity,” Auerbach denies the last word to an advocate of radical assimilation. And, in establishing a link with Goethe, with a recognized icon of German high culture,56 Auerbach’s Spinoza integrates Jewish history and German literary history by positing an inclusive Enlightenment as the common objective of both. In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe conceives of the Wandering Jew as a literary vehicle for the presentation of countercurrents in the history of religion from Pelagius to Spinoza.57 By writing Goethe’s planned literary meeting of Spinoza and the Wandering Jew as a historic secularization, a victory of reason over a theological patrimony inseparable from a negative literary image of the Jew, an emancipatory power is imputed to German literature. Secular literary culture becomes the “neutral social sphere” epitomized by Mendelssohn and Lessing’s legendary friendship,58 and the GermanJewish historical novel becomes a literary site where Jewish integration can succeed on an imaginary plane.

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In Auerbach’s Spinoza, a strong Enlightenment tendency engages in myth-making on multiple levels. The literary condensation of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, and the Wandering Jew thematic present in Goethe’s memoir remains operative in Auerbach’s novel. As Ismar Schorsch notes, Auerbach’s historical novel recoups Spinoza for Jewish history.59 The meaning for Jewish society of Spinoza’s rationalist scrutiny of sacred scripture and his contention that Jewish religious law had lost its validity with the termination of Jewish national sovereignty was by no means settled with the “Spinoza controversy” of the 1780s.60 Moses Mendelssohn’s relation to Spinoza’s thought and the consequences of such a relationship for the status of Judaism in the modern European order were hotly contested in the early nineteenth century.61 Heine claimed Mendelssohn as a Spinozist and a reformer, a “Jewish Luther” who “overturned the Talmud,”62 whereas Reform Jewish thinkers showed a more nuanced approach toward Spinoza and traditionalist Jews spurned him entirely.63 The German-Jewish reception of Spinoza was not merely fractious, it was often contradictory. Immanuel Wolf, for example, could simultaneously declare the monotheistic idea to be the “essence of Judaism” and praise Spinoza’s system as essential for an understanding of Judaism’s “inner spirit.”64 The “Mendelssohn legend” in German-Jewish culture was equally elastic,65 and thus it should not surprise to recognize the ways in which the G ­ erman-Jewish Maskil figures behind the scenes in Auerbach’s Spinoza, as a part of the same ideology of “revealed deism” that Auerbach attributed to M ­ endelssohn in Judaism and Recent Literature. “In our own reason, in the heights of the pure divine thought, here is Sinai,”66 exclaims Spinoza before the rabbinic court in Auerbach’s novel. Auerbach’s historical fiction claims Spinoza as a precursor of the eighteenth-century German-Jewish Enlightenment as Mendelssohn’s thoughts on reason and revelation resonate in the words of the seventeenth-century Spinoza.67 In his next novel, Dichter und Kaufmann (Poet and Merchant; 1840), Auerbach would contribute more directly to the “Mendelssohn legend” with a historical portrait of Mendelssohn himself,68 yet the intertextual evidence of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit in Auerbach’s Spinoza illustrates how Auerbach’s historical novel of secularization contributes to Enlightenment myth-making as Spinoza and Mendelssohn are recast as agents of an exemplary German-Jewish cultural synthesis.

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

Jewish History Confronts Secularization The apotheosis of Spinoza in Auerbach’s historical novel becomes the secularization of Jewish history. In Spinoza, secularization is a historical dynamic akin to Max Weber’s concept of Entzauberung der Welt, “the elimination of magic from the world.”69 In Auerbach’s hands, Jewish history becomes a German-language Bildungsroman. The narrative follows the young Spinoza’s education, and the plot is revealed as a progressive demystification of received notions. More than merely enshrining Spinoza as a hero of a Judaism remodeled as rational universalist religion, Auerbach’s historical novel transforms the structure of Jewish history by positing an open future based on the principle of secularization, which at the same time secures the survival of Jewish culture through the invention of new traditions and the transformation of cultural forms. The dynamic of secularization enters Jewish history as a reaction to fanaticism and oppression. The young Spinoza is introduced to the reader as an inquisitive young rabbi, an exceptional student of Rabbi Saul Morteira, quick at solving intricate Talmudic problems. But the stormy background of his Spanish-Jewish heritage provides Spinoza with enough examples of the tragic consequences of religious persecution to drive the ambitious intellect to a critique of all institutions which foster religious division. The world of the philosopher-to-be is quickly turned upside down with two novelistic conventions of historical analepsis.70 First, a mysterious stranger shows up at the funeral of Uriel Acosta and tells the young Spinoza of his uncle Geronimo, a secret Jew who became a monk and was ultimately tortured to insanity and death by the Inquisition. Then, responding to young ­Baruch’s questions about his mother’s origins (Chisdai, a rival student, had taunted Baruch that his mother was a “Moor”), Spinoza’s father gives the boy his testament, intended to be read posthumously.71 The tale of persecution, forced conversion, and the father’s hope for a Judaism that would be more a religion of “love” than one of “observance” drive the fifteen-year-old Spinoza to no longer see “the Jewish people and its teaching as the center of life in the world.”72 “A voice, more powerful than the one in the synagogue, called Baruch to bless the unwritten revealed law, whose two pillars are liberation from every form of

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division by tribe or belief and love of humanity. Did not Maimonides teach that the faithful of all religions achieve salvation? B ­ aruch was no longer the son of Israel, he was the son of humanity.”73 From a Sephardic-Jewish history awash in blood, Auerbach’s Spinoza draws an ecumenical lesson which brings him into conflict with the Jewish community. Yet, in contrast to Gutzkow’s The Sadducee of Amsterdam, the community’s rejection of a renegade does not perforce infer an irresoluble opposition of the “universal” to the “particular.” Rather, the process of secularization initiated by the unleashed critical spirit confronts the idiosyncrasy which inheres in the universal and resonates in the very Jewish society which casts out Spinoza. Radicalized by the historical example of the Inquisition, Spinoza’s “restless spirit” now challenges his teacher on points of Jewish law.74 The action in Auerbach’s historical novel consists largely of philosophical debates in which the young Spinoza demystifies religious tenets. With a strict allegiance to reason, Auerbach’s Spinoza dismisses even Maimonides’ rationalist interpretation of angels as prophetic visions as a “half-way measure” which hesitates to take contradictions between reason and scripture to their uncomfortable logical conclusions.75 As a force for modernization, however, Spinoza’s uncompromising critique of religion valorizes the worldly elements in Jewish culture, as an appreciation of Talmud is secularized. In Auerbach’s Spinoza, the same young Baruch who rebels against the “mental gymnastics of Talmud study[’s] . . . empty forms” is stimulated by a tractate whose difficult questions of geometry require Rabbi Morteira to give a lecture based on a Hebrew translation of Euclid. In Auerbach’s novel, the drive to acquire secular knowledge propels Spinoza to go beyond the boundaries of a traditional Jewish culture portrayed as largely hostile to outside influences.76 Spinoza learns Latin and reads the New Testament, and the historical dynamic of secularization is carried over into the non-Jewish world through his critical analysis: “He paid no mind to the miracles. The parables, too, with their many Talmudic references, did not make a great impression on him. He experienced all too often in his rabbinical studies how inner inadequacies, which are nothing more than incomplete thoughts, and external inadequacies, which are nothing more than cowardice, often used such disguises. And did it not say that Christ himself gave the

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

truth undisguised to his disciples?”77 Auerbach’s Spinoza extracts those elements from religious traditions, Jewish or not, which contribute to his evolving philosophy of immanence, while purging that which reason identifies as logically groundless or mere superstition. The philosophical critique which begins as a private reading experience extends into the social realm as Spinoza becomes part of a circle of non-Jewish Dutch intellectuals who take the “philosophically naïve” youth under their guidance. Yet it is in dialogue with these progressive Protestant and Catholic thinkers that Jewish tradition is reinvented in Auerbach’s historical novel. In a crucial passage, Spinoza’s mentors Oldenburg and Meyer engage him in a discussion of Cartesian thought. The young Spinoza is critical of Descartes’ dualism and dismisses the French thinker’s facile division of mind and body through a comparison with a folktale heard from his German-Jewish housemaid Chaje. After recounting her story of the golem of Prague, an inanimate body brought to life and rendered inert through magic, Spinoza concludes: “The great Rabbi Löw certainly wasn’t thinking of Descartes and yet his golem has as much life as any human being, if you agree with the new Cartesian view that the connection between soul and body is so loose that, at any moment, it might be undone and then reconstituted.”78 Chaje’s tales of the magic powers of the kabbalah had previously inspired the truth-seeker Spinoza to study its secrets with Rabbi Aboab. Spinoza submits Jewish mysticism to the same rigorous criticism as any other source, “striving to separate the inner core” (those elements which prefigure his pantheism) “from the quaint exterior,”79 but now popular legends and beliefs are not only rejected as senseless superstition, but rather become the object of a modern folkloristic interest, both through their “realistic” presentation to a general reading public as a simple woman’s tale-within-a-tale in Auerbach’s historical novel,80 and as the topic for a conversation between Oldenburg and Spinoza in the novel on how folk themes might be improved to become “poetry or satire.”81 Thus, the creation of a new Jewish literature as a consequence of the modern historical mechanism of secularization itself becomes a subject of reflection in the first modern Jewish historical novel. A more differentiated understanding of the possible outcomes of a meeting of Judaism and modernity and a more intricate version of

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the indispensable love story prevent Auerbach’s historical novel from concluding with Gutzkow’s vision of Jewish history as an aporia of conflict between glorified liberal unity and demonized Jewish idiosyncrasy. But closer analysis reveals that, in Auerbach’s Spinoza, the societal fault lines brought about by Enlightenment and secularization have shifted rather than mended. The opposing narrative trajectories of religious critique and traditionalist backlash are complicated (or complemented) by characters, such as the Jewish doctor Salomon de Silva, who deny that an openness to secular culture can only lead to heresy. Encouraging Spinoza’s father to let the boy study Latin with a Christian, he says: “I can’t believe that you, too, are one of those who would forget our youth and introduce Polish darkness here. We owe the respect and honor which we enjoy here (and here the doctor’s face shone proudly) only to the fact that we have something to say about the secular subjects [Wissenschaften], too.”82 This Jewish advocate of secular learning reassures the elder Spinoza that he has no reason to fear that Baruch might become a Christian, for he is too well-versed in Jewish tradition to be led astray by Christian readings of the Bible. A greater danger to youth, says de Silva, is posed by sensualist-­materialist “free spirits,” but even these are not a significant threat to one who believes that “true scholarship [Wissenschaft] will ultimately lead to faith.”83 The dialogic narrative reveals the double function of the ­German-Jewish historical novel as both a literary vehicle for secularization (in the figure of the young Spinoza) and as a reaction formation against radical secularization (in the figure of the ­Portuguese-Jewish doctor). In Auerbach’s novel, western European Jewish society has internalized critique and has found its Other in Eastern Jewry (“­Polish darkness”). Auerbach’s novel clearly participates in the ideology of “Sephardic supremacy.”84 Auerbach idealizes Iberian-Jewish traditions to create a usable past that would detach German Jews from their eastern European brethren (and, more importantly, their own Ashkenazic past), who were now invested with all of the negative qualities which supposedly stood in the way of the German Jews’ own emancipation.85 The ideology which saw Yiddishspeaking Jewry as degenerate compared with the achievements of Spanish Jewry widely pervaded Wissenschaft des Judentums in its founding phase. The language of Auerbach’s Dr. de Silva anachro-

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

nistically reflects the modern historical consciousness of the first generation of Jewish historians, illustrating how German-Jewish historical fiction and historiography were informed by the same ideology: an understanding of Jewish history as an implicit narrative of a “golden age” in a (medieval, not biblical) past, the present as a period of decline, and an unwritten future that might regain lost glory with the aid of modern Wissenschaft. ­Auerbach’s contemporaries recognized historical fiction as a complement to the project of a reinvigoration of Judaism through academic study and the introduction of historical thinking and applauded his Spinoza. Adapting the vocabulary of Schiller’s aesthetics, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums’s reviewer saw the Jewish historical novel as the missing “grace” (Anmut) necessary to temper the “gravity” (Ernst) of Wissenschaft des Judentums.86 The German-Jewish historical novel was intended to be a domain where the ideologies that informed a nineteenth-century Jewish historiography that strove for objectivity could be played out creatively. To be sure, Auerbach’s historical novel “facilitates the re-appropriation of Spinoza” for a Judaism recast as universalism,87 yet the novel’s protagonist is also a figure of thought for the ambivalence and anxiety brought on by the radical secularism denounced in Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur. Drawing on both a Jewish tradition that “only renegades can issue forth from parents of mixed religions,”88 and the secular literary figure of the illegitimate son as a predetermined harbinger of social instability,89 Auerbach’s Spinoza is marked from birth as a potential outsider to Jewish society because of his mixed parentage (a fact which the parochially pious in Auerbach’s novel never let Baruch forget).90 But this element of apparently preordained alienation is introduced not so much to relativize the hero (Spinoza’s ­canonization at the end of the novel surely weighs against this) as to bring into play the problematic of conversion, which tests the limits of secularization and Enlightenment and transforms Judaism. Spinoza learns from reading his father’s melodramatic testament that his mother, Manuela, was born to Muslim parents and became a Jew out of love for his father. The episode, which is not historical,91 highlights the theme of religious coercion. Against the background of a repressive Christian power which seeks to stamp out all customs of the “Moorish Christians,” Manuela’s resolution to join the community of

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secret Jews and flee to Amsterdam is portrayed less as an embrace of spiritual truth than as the reaction of a desperate girl who has just lost her father, tinged with the sentimentalism of one who forgoes everything for the beloved. Auerbach’s Spinoza does just the opposite. He and Olympia, the daughter of his Catholic tutor van der Ende, fall in love. But the tolerant van der Ende draws the line at giving his daughter to one who won’t convert, and Spinoza’s Protestant rival ­Kerkering happily steps in while he is busy hearing the rabbinical court’s verdict. A historical-political analogy is thus established that resounds in ­nineteenth-century Germany, as well: a system marred by an incomplete secularization that exacts conversion as the price for social acceptance is tainted by the memory of the Inquisition. Banned by the Jewish world and betrayed by Olympia, Spinoza is saved from the despondent isolation of Gutzkow’s Acosta through the annulment of the sentimental aesthetic. Renouncing a society that demands a sacrifice of belief, the novel affirms a principle of bourgeois culture. Deciding to retreat to a life of “self-control . . . renunciation . . . equilibrium,”92 Auerbach’s Spinoza personifies the “peaceful ­effect” which Goethe praised in the philosopher whom he never introduced to the incarnation of unsettledness and affliction, Ahasuerus.93 Innerlichkeit, a spiritual notion of inwardness with roots in German Pietism, is established as the foundation of all true belief. Spinoza thereby harmonizes with a redefinition of Jewish identity as strictly confessional. Spinoza stakes out an uncertain territory that would be decisive for the German-Jewish historical novel of the nineteenth century. Privileging “belief” over “love,” Auerbach’s novel preaches against a false Enlightenment of sensualism,94 as it protests an insufficiently secularized world where religious prejudice endures even against those who have moved to a level of spiritual consciousness beyond religion. Fashioning its hero after Goethe’s archetype of the vita contemplativa, Auerbach’s Spinoza embeds a notion of high culture as a realm of solace in the Jewish historical novel, while the unspoken wish to secure the place of minority narratives in a new cultural fusion mingles with a strategy of consolation for its failure. The insistent refusal, documented by the historian George Mosse, of Jewish individuals and cultural organizations to reject the values of Bildung and Enlightenment,

Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza

even in the period of Nazi ghettoization and persecution.95 This view of high culture as a refuge is established in the very first GermanJewish novel. What is implicit in Auerbach’s novel is addressed directly in ­Spinoza’s preface, that the forces of modernization and secularization which are constitutive for a minority literature also shape its predicament: “Jewish life is disintegrating more and more . . . for that reason, it appears to me that it is time to seize its movements in an image with poetry and history.”96 Historical fiction presents a snapshot of a process, an image of a society in profound transformation. Entitled “The Ghetto,” Auerbach’s preface introduces Spinoza as the first in a planned series of portraits of Jewish life. It is here that Auerbach’s conception of historical fiction and minority literature is developed. Auerbach invokes artistic autonomy for his “images of times and customs” (historische Zeit- und Sittenbilder): “As little as I intend these images as means for moral or religious Enlightenment, so little do I have in mind that highest goal of forward-thinking Jews, Emancipation. The highest and single goal of poetry is itself.” Despite this disclaimer, the German-Jewish historical novel is an inherently political project. The factors so decisive for Auerbach in Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur remain operative. As much as Auerbach’s preference for the historical novel as a model of an “objective . . . popular” literature aligns him more with Wolfgang Menzel’s aesthetic program than with Das junge Deutschland,97 Auerbach’s preface reacts strongly against the former’s anti-Jewish invective: “Menzel can count me as a late-born Young German or label me a Jewish writer—I don’t care.”98 However Auerbach may deny an apologetic tendency in his Spinoza, a minority literature stands under permanent threat of expulsion from national narratives of literary history. Auerbach acknowledges that it violates chronology to begin his “Ghetto” series with Spinoza—“for, in a higher sense, the ghetto ends with Spinoza”—but he counters that “the ghetto endures until today.”99 Auerbach’s preface posits a minority literature as a “ghetto literature.” Not a literature about the ghetto, a nostalgic portrait of customs and beliefs marginalized in a modern age,100 as much as a literature of the ghetto, of a society in which both incomplete secularization and radical secularization push a secular Jewish culture to the margins. As the narrative attempts to

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break out of the ghetto, the historical novel becomes the exemplary genre of a German-Jewish minority culture. The question of how far a minority literature could extend from the ghetto would continue to occupy Jewish novelists. In fact, it had been simmering in Heinrich Heine since the 1820s.

Two “Who learns history from Heine?” Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840)

If modernity is a break with the past, then what remains are fragments. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) used the designation “fragment” as a subtitle for only two of his works, and it is telling that these are two narratives in which both Jewish themes and the nature of history are most prevalent. The first of these works was his novel fragment Der Rabbi von Bacherach (The Rabbi of Bacherach). Although he had begun writing it in 1824 (and researching it even earlier), Heine did not publish Der Rabbi von Bacherach until 1840. Outraged by the reaction of the supposedly progressive European powers to anti-Jewish persecution sparked by ritual-murder accusations in Damascus (French officials had initially supported the charges out of political calculations related to their influence in the region), Heine did more than undertake an active journalistic campaign to protest the resurgence of shadowy myths in an allegedly enlightened century: he again took up his unfinished historical novel about a rabbi and his wife who flee a massacre prompted by a blood libel, added a third chapter, and published the work as a fragment.1 Begun thirteen years before the appearance of Auerbach’s Spinoza, Heine’s is the first attempt at a modern Jewish historical novel. 2 Like Auerbach, Heine turns to history (and, especially, to Spanish-Jewish figures) to reshape Jewish cultural memory and to engage with the central problems of a modern secular Jewish literature in the German language. Heine’s relation to the nascent modern Jewish historical consciousness is even more direct than Auerbach’s; as a member of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, Heine had intimate links to pioneering modern Jewish historians like Leopold Zunz (1794– 1886). The Cultur-Verein was founded in Berlin in 1819 by Jewish uni-

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versity students inspired by Hegel and challenged by the “Hep-Hep” pogroms which swept Germany that summer; Heine joined in 1822.3 Wissenschaft des Judentums revolutionized Jews’ relation to their history by insisting on an objective, scholarly method uncoupled from religious beliefs and popular myths. If modern historians investigated the Jewish past from the perspective of a present in which tradition had been rendered problematic, Heine’s novel responds by positing secular literature—historical fiction—as a form of cultural memory for modernizing Jews. Conceived in dialogue with the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums and often reprinted, Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach had a defining influence on the German-Jewish historical novel. In its themes (the relation of German Jews to Sephardic m ­ odels, to their own “ghetto” origins, and, above all, the confrontation between religion and secular culture) and in its turn to the past as a means of confronting a contemporary political context characterized both by historical optimism about Jewish integration in an enlightened Europe and by historical pessimism about exclusion and persecution in a world still plagued with anti-Semitic barbarism,4 the rough edges of Heine’s aesthetically uneven fragment might be said to mark the boundaries in which all subsequent imaginary Jewish histories would inscribe themselves.

Heine and Haggadah: History, Narration, and Tradition in the Age of Wissenschaft des Judentums An anecdote is related about Leopold Zunz. When asked about an outright historical error in Heine’s Hebräische Melodien (Hebrew M ­ elodies) (the misattribution of a certain liturgical poem to Jehuda Halevi), Zunz is said to have replied with a shrug: “Who learns history from Heine’s poems?”5 Whether or not this anecdote is true, it reveals a tension: Zunz’s dismissal of Heine’s fiction as a source of historical knowledge underscores a perception of a strict division of labor between the historian and the novelist. Yet Heine, who was well acquainted with the debates among figures like Zunz and fellow Verein members Moses Moser, Immanuel Wohlwill, and Eduard Gans, understood his plan for a historical novel as a contribution to the project of a modern Jewish

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

historiography which could serve as the foundation for a new understanding of Jewish culture. In his letters to Zunz and Moser, Heine links his work on Der Rabbi von Bacherach to his concern with the creation of a “new Jewish literature.”6 In Heine’s novel, it is the theme of “Haggadah”—of narrative itself—that highlights the ruptures between traditional modes of Jewish collective memory and nineteenth-century historicist approaches to Jewish history. The theme of Haggadah also points to the possibility that nineteenth-century historical fiction could negotiate this divide. The first chapter of Der Rabbi von Bacherach is set during Passover 1487, in the Rhineland town of Bacherach. Rabbi Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish community, leads the Passover seder, intoning from the Haggadah. Heine’s novel of Jewish history references “that quintessential exercise in Jewish group memory,” in which, for traditional Jews, the Exodus from Egypt is not merely recalled but is reactualized, and participants are enjoined to consider that they themselves were freed from slavery.7 Yet Heine’s tale is no timeless, mythic fusion of past and present; his Passover story is structured in the fashion of a modern European narrative. Der Rabbi von Bacherach opens with an allusion to Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820).8 Where Scott’s omniscient narrator (embedded anonymously in the nineteenth-century present), evokes “that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the Don,” where “haunted of yore the fabulous Dragon of Wantley,”9 Heine’s tale begins with a similar “panoramic” survey of medieval ruins along the Rhine: “Below the mountainous range known as the Rheingau, the banks of the Rhine river put off their smiling look. Where the hills and cliffs with their romantic castles rise more defiantly, and where a wilder, sterner dignity prevails, there lies, like a fearful legend of olden times, the gloomy and ancient town of Bacherach.”10 There are several important ways in which Heine’s novel is modeled on Scott’s Ivanhoe (to which we will turn our attention later), but here one notes how Heine uses the narrative conventions of the writer whose name was by then synonymous with the European historical novel; and by doing this he foregrounds a divide between past and present, modernity’s recognition of an essential difference between the “planes of historicity.”11 Circumspect regarding the politics of German Romanticism (which

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Heine understood as a “revival of the middle ages”),12 Heine’s narrator conjures up an enchanted Rhineland scene that is demystified when Bacherach’s Saint Werner’s Church is revealed as a monument to a child alleged to have been the victim of ritual murder in the fourteenth century. For the modern German Jew, the imagery is complex. At one level, it is an example of dissimilation: if a Goethe or a Novalis (and their nationalist popularizers) saw in the Christian Middle Ages essential elements of German identity, German Jews’ memories would necessarily diverge. The Gothic cathedrals and castles are part of their history, too, yet they remind German Jews of the massacres during the ­Crusades. On another level, however, recollection of medieval prejudice reinforces an Enlightenment sense of history, in which the present is the gateway to a future of infinite progressive potential. The focus of Der Rabbi von Bacherach then telescopically narrows to 1487, two hundred years after the building of Bacherach’s Saint ­Werner’s Church. During the seder service (richly described, in keeping with Scott’s style, to sate the reader’s nostalgic and folkloristic interest), two mysterious strangers arrive and are extended traditional hospitality. But when Rabbi Abraham discovers in horror that the guests have planted a child’s corpse to provoke charges of ritual murder, frightful scenes from past ages reveal themselves as “still” possible, and notions of history as gradual “progress” are questioned. When Heine wrote this chapter, in 1824, this message might have resonated with German Jews whose recent (1812) emancipation from medieval restrictions was significantly reversed in the 1820s. The broader German audience might have interpreted it in light of the general reactionary atmosphere that followed the defeat of Napoleon. But when Heine published his fragment, in 1840, the recent blood libel in D ­ amascus had created a context where notions of history collided: the mythic time of the Haggadah (where a narrative of the past is infused with expectations of messianic redemption) confronts a narrative in which the anticipation of an open future of enlightened progress is threatened by the reemergence of medieval prejudice. Heine’s Passover tale is grafted onto a time-space axis which is an allegory of maskilic and historicist thought. When Rabbi Abraham and his wife, “Beautiful Sara,” notice the dead child’s body under the table,

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

they quietly flee up the Rhine to Frankfurt, leaving Bacherach’s Jews unaware of the coming pogrom. The Jewish Middle Ages, symbolized by Bacherach, is held up as a heroic era of suffering and spiritual resistance: “Yet the more hate oppressed them from without, the more earnestly and tenderly did the Jews of Bacherach cherish their domestic life within, and the deeper was the growth among them of piety and the fear of God” (23, 111). This commemoration of medieval martyrs, prevalent in both scholarship and in popular forms of Jewish historical culture in the nineteenth century, is a further example of dissimilation: a Jewish version of German Romanticism, which builds on premodern institutions of Ashkenazic Jewish collective memory like the Memorbücher.13 At the same time, the Romantic view of Jewish history that informs Der Rabbi von Bacherach firmly anchors the German Jews in the same Rhineland landscape of ruined castles that fueled German national musings in the nineteenth century.14 As Rabbi Abraham and Beautiful Sara flee from the slaughter in Bacherach, the description of the Rhine makes this clear: Then the Rhine seemed to murmur the melodies of the Agade, and from its waters the pictures, large as life and in strange exaggerated guise, came forth one by one. There was the patriarch Abraham frightfully smashing the idols, which pieced themselves together ever anew; the Mitzri fiercely defending himself against an enraged Moses; Mount Sinai in lightening and flames; Pharaoh swimming in the Red Sea, holding his zigzagged gold crown tight in his teeth, frogs with men’s faces swimming behind him, and the waves foaming and roaring, while a dark giant-hand rises threatening from the deep. (39, 120)

Minority cultural memory nurtures overlapping collective identities— German and German-Jewish—as it serves the ends of Emancipation. The remembrance of medieval persecutions along the Rhine would now inspire belief: not so much in a God who hears the prayers of martyrs, but in a deep sense of belonging to one’s native land and in an Enlightenment that would consign anti-Semitism to a dark and distant past. In Heine’s hand, these images—from an illustrated Passover Haggadah—form a narrative of their own, one which encodes his historical views: Judaism, understood as rational religion (Abraham smashing the idols), survives its persecutors (who are perhaps iden-

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tified with Europe’s old order, suggested by the focus on Pharaoh’s crown), but must remain wary of the reemergence of the dark forces that are presumed to have been defeated (the “threatening” hand of the drowned Egyptian). The progress of Heine’s narrative can be seen as an illustration of Jewish Enlightenment thought, of its historical teleology. Bacherach, the setting of the first chapter, represents a “golden age” of Jewish piety and community. But the Sephardic bias of the early phase of Wissenschaft des Judentums is reflected in the fact that Heine could not see this golden age in medieval Ashkenaz on its own terms: Rabbi Abraham’s great reputation is attributed to his years of study in T ­ oledo (a historical improbability for a medieval German rabbi), where he absorbed “habits of free thinking, like many Spanish Jews who had at that time attained a very remarkable degree of culture [Bildung]” (24, 111). Heine’s use of the term Bildung projects nineteenth-century German cultural ideas backward onto a Spanish model.15 The next station in Rabbi Abraham and Beautiful Sara’s journey symbolizes both historical progress and decline. In chapter 2 (drafted in 1824 and revised in 1840), the fugitives traverse the colorful spectacle of the Frankfurt fair en route to the ghetto. Rabbi Abraham three times orders his wife to close her eyes: to the baubles for sale, to a parade of prostitutes, and to priests making the sign of the cross. Here, Frankfurt represents a modern metropolis in contrast to “medieval” Bacherach, and the temptations of its marketplace seem to be a projection of the fears of those aspects of modern society which threaten to dissolve traditional Jewish identity (conversion, sensualism, and materialism).16 Yet the Jewish world that Abraham and Sara find on the other side of the ghetto wall is no idealized refuge from these pressures. Frankfurt’s Jews are represented by a series of comic figures whose mock-Yiddish is meant to symbolize their debased station.17 In Heine’s tale, the ghetto represents a double bondage, its gate locked from inside as well from outside (“How badly guarded is Israel!” cries Rabbi Abraham upon entering the Frankfurt ghetto, “False friends guard its gates without, and within, its guardians are folly and fear” [57, 131]).18 Abraham and Sara make their way to the synagogue. There, Sara faints as the rabbi prays for the Jews of Bacherach, presumably massacred.

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

Der Rabbi von Bacherach abounds in pictures of traditional Jewish communal life in crisis: plagued by murderous persecution in the first chapter, debased by ghetto confinement in the middle chapter, and challenged by religious rebels in the fragment’s third and final chapter. Chapter 3, composed entirely in 1840, introduces the couple to Don Isaak Abarbanel, presented in Heine’s novel as the apostate nephew of the historical figure with the same name. If the Passover setting of the novel prompts certain narrative expectations, positing the modern historical novel as a new kind of “Haggadah” that could define a narrative of liberation in nineteenth-century terms, then Heine’s Abarbanel figure raises provocative questions. In contrast to Rabbi Abraham, a pious Ashkenazic Jew whose contact with Sephardic learning has made him a model for a modern synthesis of secular Bildung with Jewish religious thought, Don Isaac is a religious radical. Son of a baptized father, Heine’s Abarbanel rejects Judaism and Christianity in favor of sensualism. Most interpretations of Heine’s novel see this opposition of Jewish piety to secularism as an irresolvable conflict that leads to the breakdown of the narrative. But as I will demonstrate below, Heine’s Abarbanel figure is actually an amplification of the “Haggadah” motif of the earlier chapters. The theme of “Haggadah” in Der Rabbi von Bacherach is illuminated by an examination of Heine’s 1851 long poem “Jehuda ben ­Halevi,” which forms the second section of the Hebräische Melodien and is the other of his works subtitled “Fragment.” Heine’s “Jehuda ben Halevi” recounts the fame of the twelfth-century Spanish-Jewish poet and philosopher Jehuda Halevi (1085–1140). This poem, too, is the product of Heine’s reception of Wissenschaft des Judentums; it illustrates the evolving interrelations of German-Jewish literature and historical thought, twenty-five years after Heine began work on Der Rabbi von Bacherach. A quarter-century after the Cultur-Verein had dissolved, Wissenschaft des Judentums was gradually exerting a wider influence in the Jewish world, and German-Jewish philologists and historians were furnishing German-Jewish writers with ample source material.19 Heine drew upon Michael Sachs’s 1845 study Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (The Religious Poetry of the Jews in Spain) itself

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an example of Wissenschaft’s predilection for Sephardic subjects.20 Heine’s poem begins by recalling Halevi’s education and aesthetic development: Yes, his father early led him To the pages of the Talmud, And thereby he laid before him The Halacha, that prodigious School of fencing, where the greatest Of the dialectic athletes In the Babylonian contests Used to carry on their war games. Here the boy could master every Art and science of polemic; And his mastery was later Witnessed by his book Kuzari. But the heavens shed upon us Two quite different kinds of luster: There’s the sun’s harsh-glaring daylight And the milder moonlight—likewise. Likewise, shining in the Talmud Is a double light divided, divided In Halacha and Haggada. Fencing school I called the former. But the latter, the Haggada, I would rather call a garden, A phantasmagoric garden That is very like another That once bloomed and sprouted also From the soil of Babylonia— Queen Semiramis’ great garden, That eighth wonder of the world.21

Heine’s poem distinguishes between two forms in traditional Jewish literature. His term Haggada refers here to the Aggadah, the nonlegal, narrative portion of the Talmud (the word is formed from the root meaning “to narrate”), in contrast to the Halacha, which is concerned

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

with the clarification of laws and rules for religious practice. By adding the definite article Ha-, Heine makes the term indistinguishable from Haggadah, which is usually used to refer to the ­Haggadah shel Pesach, the book of readings for the Passover holiday. The fusion of the terms is no confusion on Heine’s part, as is sometimes claimed.22 Instead, H ­ eine’s poem links the “creative,” narrative elements in Jewish religious tradition with the story of the Exodus from Egypt, with a narrative of redemption from captivity in a strange land. This ­image of writing as something intimately connected to both exile and its overcoming must have had special resonance for Heine, who, as a ­German-Jewish literary émigré in Paris, so often made his own heightened sense of bittersweet estrangement the theme of his work. Especially in the works in which the Jewish past is engaged, Heine’s texts draw our attention to an alienation that is not only material and spatial (exile from both the Germany of his youth and of his readers, as well as exile from the land of Israel), but also temporal and spiritual (modernity’s rupture with the belief community of the past). Writing stands in a double relation to this alienation from tradition: the modern narrative both accentuates the break with the past and points to ways in which this rupture might be bridged. In the poem “Jehuda ben Halevi,” the words Haggadah and ­Halacha represent above all two distinct models of writing.23 The sensual delights of narrative are opposed to the hard-nosed polemics of legal debate. The young poet Judah Halevi is said to flee into the realm of Haggadah’s “phantasmagoric garden,” away from the legal polemics of that “fencing school,” the Halacha. Most interpreters of Heine have seen in this polarization a celebration of the freedom of literature over the narrow strictures of the law, or by extension over academic historiography, “a vindication of poetry against ‘scientific’ prose.”24 The poem, however, does not dispense with Halacha as a literary model, for its study is said to have borne fruit in Halevi’s philosophical apology for Judaism, the Kuzari.25 But if the religious polemics that Heine associates with Halacha are decidedly shunned as “distasteful” in the next section of the Hebräische Melodien (Hebrew Melodies) (entitled “Disputation”), then “narrative” (as something distinct from polemic) is clearly privileged. For Heine, Haggadah signifies both the historical sphere and the artistic sphere: a form of narrative which combines

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the inspiring power of literary technique with a sense of tradition and historical mission: With its lovely olden fables, Tales of angels, myths, and legends, Tranquil stories of the martyrs, Festive songs and wise old sayings, Droll exaggerations also, Yet it all had faith’s old power. (106, 134)

However, “faith’s old power” is also profoundly called into question at the same time as it is sentimentally recalled in “Jehuda ben Halevi.” For some interpreters, the fact that Heine compares Haggadah to a garden like the one “That once bloomed and sprouted also / From the soil of Babylonia” has suggested a vision of “poetry originating from a Jewish tradition that throughout history flourished in exile, a site where cultural activity is associated with cross-cultural fertilization.”26 But to see in Heine’s metaphor only a celebration of the diaspora’s cultural richness is to miss the suggestion of Babylon as a profanation. For, in Heine’s poem, the figure of Jehuda Halevi cannot simply be a figure for Heine himself, a kind of self-congratulatory praise of the creative power of the diaspora poet. In “Jehuda ben Halevi,” the dynamic of historical recollection in modernity brings with it a melancholy undertone, the deflating process of secularization, an acknowledgment of a chasm which implicitly divides the nineteenth-century German poet and his audience from the Jewish world of the twelfth century. Heine’s narrative of the life of Judah Halevi is interrupted when the poet turns to address his French wife, who has never heard of H ­ alevi. ­Heine responds to her ignorance of Halevi, first, by indicting the French educational system, which crams the heads of youth with all sorts of knowledge about the medieval and ancient worlds yet ignores the great Jewish poets of Muslim Spain; and, second, by urging her To make up what you’ve neglected, And to learn the Hebrew language; Drop the theater and concerts. (123, 151)

In Heine’s reproach to his (non-Jewish) French wife, one can imagine that many of his modern Jewish contemporaries are also addressed. If

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

“Haggadah” has a meaning for Heine’s generation, it is not simply a question of whether literature (as “Haggadah”) can act as a corrective to dry history, but rather of how a secular culture, which encompasses both history and literature, can relate to tradition. It is in this regard that Heine’s historian fiction shares the concerns of the first modern Jewish historians, the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, which emerged from the Cultur-Verein. For the founders of Wissenschaft des Judentums, a secular Jewish historiography demanded the uncoupling of historical narrative from the normative weight of tradition.27 Religious traditions and the Jewish past were to be researched independently of any investment in their prescriptive value, without regard to whether it “should or could also be the norm for our own judgement.”28 In his programmatic essay in the first issue of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (1823), Immanuel Wolf posited historical objectivity as the highest aim of Jewish scholarship (Wissenschaft des Judentums). It was Zunz who wrote in Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (On Rabbinic Literature; 1818) that in an era when Jews in Germany were increasingly adopting secular German culture and were “thus—perhaps unintentionally or unknowingly— carrying postbiblical Hebrew literature to its grave,” Wissenschaft would emerge to demand “an account from that which is closed.”29 As the historian Michael Meyer has argued, in contrast to the GermanJewish reformers of the 1830s and 1840s, for whom a critical-historical approach to religious tradition nourished commitment to new conceptions of Judaism, the historians of the Cultur-Verein milieu “failed to develop a rationale for continued Jewish identification.”30 The Hegelianism of Eduard Gans and Moses Moser provided an ideology which incorporated Judaism into world history, but saw no future development for Jewish culture in modernity. Heine, who joined the Verein in 1822, emerged as a subtle yet formidable critic of his associates; his insights into the limits of their vision of the relation of history to modern Jewish culture suggest a unique role for literary narrative in negotiating a new relation to the past. Before turning to a more detailed analysis of Der Rabbi von Bacherach as part of a critical dialogue with Wissenschaft des Judentums, I would like to examine how the historians of the Wissenschaft movement viewed “Aggadah” (in the following, I will use Aggadah and

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­ eine’s spelling, “Haggadah,” interchangeably). On one level, Heine’s H reclaiming of “Haggadah” is part of a larger trend in Jewish thought in early nineteenth-century Germany.31 For Leopold Zunz, narrative and legend were essential components of Jewish historical culture. In his 1832 book Die Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden (Jewish Religious Sermons), Zunz declares that “history, which in its elements is often itself only legend and handed-down belief, is both explained and improved through new legends; the interpreted word and the enjoined Halacha are made clearer through narratives; in a certain way they are made perceptible to the senses.”32 Yet Zunz stresses that this narrative mode was always fundamentally bound up with the moral impulses of the prophetic tradition. If the early phase (1820s) of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement was faulted by critics such as Gershom Scholem for positing too sharp a break with Jewish collective memory,33 it is through this emphasis on the continuities in religious-­historical narrative traditions that Zunz begins to fashion a new modern identity. His attempt to legitimize the modern sermon by revealing it as the inheritor of the prophets and the Aggada thus portrays narrative as a means both of preservation and renewal. For Heine, too, “Haggadah” was a way of making tradition “perceptible to the senses,” yet, in his view, there was a considerable gulf between the spiritual claims of the past and the sensual and material demands of the present. Questions of how “Haggadah” can respond to the challenges of modernity are posed most pointedly in connection with Heine’s unfinished historical novel Der Rabbi von Bacherach.34 Beyond the scholarship which has investigated “Haggadah” and Passover themes in Der Rabbi von Bacherach, with the aim of tracing Heine’s source material (i.e., the specific Haggadah he used as a model),35 two often-overlapping interpretive perspectives have predominated. Biographical criticism has seen a self-portrait of the author in the figure of the apostate Don Isaac Abarbanel. This line of criticism correlates the genesis and abandonment of the fragment (Heine’s shift from an early plan to write the story of Jehuda Abravanel, “a young Spanish Jew, a Jew from the heart, who lets himself be baptized out of luxurious wantonness,”36 to the representation in the published fragment of the Spanish Jew Don Isaac Abarbanel as a self-styled heathen), with an increasingly distanced relation to Judaism supposedly expressed

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

by Heine in the published version.37 Structuralist approaches to Der Rabbi von Bacherach have led to differing conclusions. Some critics find the novel fragment a failure due to the complex, unresolved thematic strands and uneven narrative moods in the novel’s turn from the lachrymose to the comic as the persecuted Rabbi Abraham meets the libertine Don Isaac.38 Others see unity in Heine’s novel fragment, linking the “freedom” motif of the first chapter’s Passover setting (the story of the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt) with the theme of apostasy and religious rebellion in chapter 3.39 Biographical readings of Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach are certainly legitimate; indeed the fact that Heine’s Don Isaak Abravanel is identified as the baptized nephew of an important figure in the Jewish world makes them unavoidable, recalling Heine’s baptism and relations with his uncle Salomon Heine (who was prominent in Hamburg’s Jewish community). But Heine’s Isaak Abarbanel is more than an unironic privileging of a secular identity beyond Judaism, and more than a parodic self-portrait. Abarbanel is, most importantly, a figure of thought for Heine’s conception of Jewish history. For Heine, the figure of Abarbanel was bound up with his understanding of “Haggadah” as something which encompasses both form and content in the construction of new forms of Jewish cultural memory. The correlations between Heine’s novel and the concerns of the nineteenth-century Jewish historians who were his fellow Verein members are not limited to a shared thematic focus rooted in an ideology of historical progress that idealized Sephardic traditions as models for bourgeois integration even as it denigrated the ghettos of Ashkenaz as spawners of cultural degeneration.40 An equally fundamental connection between Der Rabbi von Bacherach and Wissenschaft des Judentums grows out of a common origin in nineteenth-century German historicism and philological method, in the notion of source (Quelle).41 On the one hand, there is the author’s research into historical sources, his Quellenarbeit: Heine’s excerpts from the histories of Schudt and Basnage and his letters to fellow Verein members Moses Moser and Leopold Zunz document his exhaustive research into the historical background of medieval Jewry for his novel and his concern with the creation of a “new Jewish literature.”42 “Egyptian darkness” was the metaphor Heine used in one letter to Moser to describe the current state of Jewish ­historiography, the

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scant information which he could glean from Christian sources to use for his portrait of the Abravanels and the “noblest school of the Spanish Jews.”43 Moreover, Heine’s source research on Isaac ­Abarbabel led him back to the theme of H ­ aggadah. Heine took note of the fact that the historical Isaac Abravanel was the author of a well-known commentary to the Passover Haggadah, the Sebach Pesach.44 In many printed versions of the Passover Haggadah (with which Heine could easily have been familiar), Abravanel’s commentary is printed as a parallel text (Figure 7). Thus, it would be wrong to interpret the Abarbanel figure in Der Rabbi von Bacherach as a complete break with the earlier chapters, something “tacked on” in order to express alienation from the Romantic attachment to the Jewish past as depicted in the description of the Passover ceremony. It might be said that just as Abravanel’s commentary expands upon the traditional text of the Haggadah, Heine’s Abarbanel figure builds upon narrative elements already present in chapter 1. Heine’s narrative thus plays upon the theme of Haggadah to give an image of a modern Jew both connected to and distanced from the sources of the Jewish past. In his correspondence, however, Heine demonstrated an understanding of Quelle which went beyond an expression of dissatisfaction with the inadequate amount of available source material on luminaries from the Spanish-Jewish past. Writing to his fellow Verein member Moses Moser, Heine claimed that his Rabbi von Bacherach would “be a book that the Zunzes of all coming centuries will call a source [Quelle].”45 Zunz, who as a driving force behind the Cultur-Verein had dedicated his life to an assembly of the very sources which Heine lacked in the 1820s, was determined to extend the philological project of August Boeckh and Friedrich August Wolf to ancient and modern Jewish texts. The two thinkers’ differing conceptions of a modern philology prefigure an essential tension in Wissenschaft des Judentums. In contrast to Wolf’s understanding of philology as mere Alterhumsstudium, Boeckh advocated an empathetic historical-hermeneutic program which could also include modern peoples: an Erkenntnis des Erkannten, or “understanding” and “interpretation” by the human spirit of “historical relations” produced by that same spirit.46 Applied to Jewish history, the political question behind this methodological debate becomes clear: would contemporary scientific and aesthetic

Figure 7. Illustrated Haggadah from Germany with commentary by Isaac Abravanel in the margins. Manuscript: Altona, 1763. Courtesy of the Lowy Collection, Library and Archives Canada.

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practice necessitate an epistemological rupture between subject and object, an unbridgeable alienation of the modern intellectual from the Jewish culture he or she studies? Would the writing of Jewish history become no more than an antiquarian Alterthumsstudium of a civilization whose time in a teleological conception of “universal history” had long been superseded?47 Would the Jewish turn to historical thinking in the age of emancipation result in the aporia of the “universal” and the “particular” that characterized the discourse of the “Jewish Question” in nineteenth-century Germany? Heine’s declaration of Der Rabbi von Bacherach as a “source” for Jewish history underscores his intended parallel with Walter Scott and postulates a dual role for the German-Jewish historical novel. In his book Die Nordsee (The North Sea; 1826–27), Heine had celebrated Scott’s historical novels as sites of “national memories,” expressions of “the great pain over the loss of national particularities which are usually lost to modern culture.”48 However, Heine’s appreciation of the ­Walter Scott model of historical fiction was not restricted to a melancholy which mourned customs lost to modernity as it documented them in richly detailed prose. Heine could also laud the historical ­novels of Walter Scott as a literary form that could convey “the spirit of English history more truly than Hume; Sartorius is . . . right . . . to count these novels among the sources [Quellen] of English history.”49 In claiming Der Rabbi von Bacherach as a source (Quelle) for Jewish history, Heine theorizes the German-Jewish historical novel as an element of a living Jewish culture. As a “source” for Jewish history, Heine’s historical novel could become a site of memory for a new G ­ erman-Jewish culture, a new site of “national memories.”50 Yet in May 1826, Leopold Zunz received the following letter: To Dr. Zunz, appointed judge over Israel, Vice President of the ­Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden, President of the Scientific Institute, Editor of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Member of the Agricultural Commission, Librarian— With this last title I shall stop, as I am sending you herewith a copy of my latest book for the library of the Verein, with the request that in case the letter has already been transferred to Ararat, you will be kind enough to present the said copy to Mrs. Zunz to be utilized in the kitchen.

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

The major part of this book is source material [Quelle] and it is therefore indispensable for the history of our Jews. I, however, am with complete affection and friendship, your friend H. Heine. Dr. Jur. and member of the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in the Eighteenth Century.51

As he sends Zunz a copy of his latest work, Heine now emphasizes that, in contrast to his book, he can no longer be considered a “source.” The reason is hinted at in his self-definition as a “Dr. Jur.”: in anticipation of a career in law, Heine had been baptized on June 28, 1825.52 Yet rather than an expression of Heine’s alienation from Judaism and of a doubt that the future works of a convert (including his still incomplete historical novel) could be “sources” for Jewish history, his letter to Zunz is a perceptive critique of the philosophical contradictions which characterized the early phase of Wissenschaft des Judentums. In the introduction to Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur, Zunz had outlined his program for the study of Jewish history. For Zunz, Jewish sources include all works by Jewish authors.53 Following Boeckh, Zunz advocates a hermeneutics which treats the Jewish past as a whole, seeing in these Jewish sources “the gateway . . . to a total understanding [of the] cultural development of a nation in all p ­ eriods.”54 Zunz, however, conceived of a Jewish scholarship that would serve the ends of Emancipation as it strove for objectivity, that would investigate a Jewish history now “closed” for modernizing and acculturating Jews: “The equality of the Jews shall emerge from the equality of Wissenschaft des Judentums. . . . But exactly because we see Jews (speaking now only of the Germans) turning with great seriousness to the German language and to German Bildung and thus—perhaps unintentionally or unknowingly—carrying postbiblical Hebrew literature to its grave, scholarship emerges to demand an account from that which is closed.”55 When Heine identifies himself in the 1826 letter to Zunz as a member of the “Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in the Eighteenth [sic!] Century,” he shows a pained awareness of a shared uncertainty concerning the relation of the Jewish past to a present and future which now held acculturation to European society as the highest goal. In consigning his book to Mrs. Zunz’s kitchen, however, Heine is not despairing over a supposed inability to

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continue as a “source,” but asserting that secular literature would be an essential ingredient of a new Jewish culture, recalling his quip that Jewish food had done more to preserve Jewishness than all three issues of the Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des J­ udentums.56 ­Ambivalent concerning the consequences of the Jewish embrace of modern European culture—an irreparable rupture with the Jewish culture of the past— Heine posits his historical novel as a modern form of cultural memory, a supplement—perhaps even an antidote—to the historian’s project of reconstructing minority memory in modernity.57

Spain as the Showplace of German-Jewish History It was noted above how Heine’s protagonist, the (historically improbable) Spanish-educated German Rabbi Abraham, contributed to a widespread “myth of Sephardic supremacy” among German Jews.58 Yet the significance of Spanish images in Der Rabbi von Bacherach must also be seen as a result of Heine’s double model of historical fiction. Heine’s Walter Scott reception points to the Romantic, backward-looking aspects of the genre: the historical novel as a repository of memory traces of traditions defeated by modern life. Such a conception can hardly be reconciled with Heine’s well-known critique of any Romanticist “revival of the Middle Ages,” articulated in Die romantische Schule.59 The shift from the “Romantic tone” of Der Rabbi von Bacherach’s first chapters to the “lighter,” parodic mood of chapter 3 is thus to be taken, not as a break indicative of irreconcilable narrative intentions,60 but as an expression of the ambivalent philosophy of history inherent in H ­ eine’s double conception of the historical novel. Der Rabbi von Bacherach testifies to a conception of history and historical fiction which draws as much on Cervantes’ Don Quixote as on Walter Scott’s romances. In his 1837 introduction to a new German translation of Don Quixote, Heine discusses the twin origins of the historical novel in Cervantes and Scott, and points to “the parodic significance” of the former.61 The critic Manfred Windfuhr has noted the parallels between Heine’s satiric presentation in the figure of Don Isaak Abarbanel and Cervantes’ “knight of the sad countenance,” whose language is evoked by the Abravanel figure.62 At once heroic

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

and pathetic, Heine’s Isaak Abarbanel evokes Don Quixote’s quest to revive chivalric values in a prosaic modern age. Heine’s Abarbanel is by no means an unequivocally “positive” representative of a modern, secular Jew, a foil to Rabbi Abraham and the Jews of the Frankfurt ghetto.63 Drawing on the Cervantes model, Heine’s Abarbanel parodically evokes the overblown rhetoric of Don Quixote: I swear, Señora!—listen to me!—I swear—by the roses of both the kingdoms of Castile, by the Aragonese hyacinths and the pomegranite blossoms of Andalusia! by the sun which illumines all Spain with all its flowers, onions, peasoups, forests, mountains, mules, he-goats, and Old Christians! by the canopy of heaven, of which this sun is merely the golden tassel, and by the God who sits upon the roof of heaven and meditates day and night over the creation of new forms of lovely women! (71, 140)

It is the “modern,” acculturated Jew who becomes the object of ­Heine’s irony here, and it would thus be premature to conclude that Don Isaak Abarbanel’s apostasy is privileged by Heine’s narrator and that Der Rabbi von Bacherach can be correlated with a teleological conception of historical progress. Der Rabbi von Bacherach may participate in a “myth of Sephardic supremacy,” yet not through a glorification of German-Jewish assimilation in a Spanish-Jewish guise. The parallel with Don Quixote marks Heine’s Don Isaak Abarbanel as an ambivalent figure for modernization. The two models of historical fiction which converge in Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach merge to establish Spain as the (surprising) setting for German-Jewish history. The heterodox genealogy of Heine’s Don Isaak Abarbanel is evident in the subversive role attributed to historical romances in Cervantes’ tale: the local priest seeks to cure Don Quixote of his utopian-reactionary fantasy of reviving knight errantry through an “inquisition” of his library.64 The image of the Spanish reconquista as the victory of those forces which the Enlightenment would struggle against was present already in Heine’s play Almansor (1823), although there Heine focused not on Jewish figures but rather on the Muslim-Christian problematic.65 This portrayal of Spain was also a standard theme in both classical (Goethe’s Egmont) and popular German literature that demonized Catholic intolerance.66 And, surpris-

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ingly, the interweaving of Spanish and Jewish history and its coupling with the conversion problematic is already present in Walter Scott. At the end of Scott’s Ivanhoe, Rebecca, resisting Rowena’s attempts to persuade her to adopt Christianity, declares that she will leave ­England for Muslim Spain. Rebecca’s move is homologous to the historical novel itself: with the popular reception of the historical novel that Scott inspired, the fateful history of the Jews in Christian Spain becomes the negative screen onto which nineteenth-century Jewish writers project the contemporary question of the integration of the heterogeneous other—the Jew—into the new nation-state.67 In Don Isaak Abarbanel, Heine draws on both Cervantes and Scott to adopt the figure of the converted Jew as an ambivalent sign for incomplete secularization. Interpretations of Der Rabbi von Bacherach which detect in it a teleological approach to history see the appearance of the Don Isaak Abarbanel figure in chapter 3 as a thematic turning point, understanding the introduction of the self-styled heathen sensualist as the author’s historicist advocacy of a secular identity beyond Judaism, in contrast to the religious world of the opening chapter and the bustling commerce of modern capitalism presented in chapter 2. It is my contention, however, that the dynamic of secularization which underlies Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach is best illuminated through an understanding of the Abarbanel figure both as a source of thematic unity and as a figure of thought for a secularization greeted with both enthusiasm and apprehension. Heine’s historical novel can be read as a secularized Haggadah, “Haggadah” taken here to mean not only traditional narration but specifically the Haggadah shel Pesach, the book of holiday readings used in the Passover celebration, which is the setting for the first chapter of Der Rabbi von Bacherach. Margaret Rose, sensitive to the structural unity of Der Rabbi von Bacherach’s symbolism and noting the importance of both the Scott and Cervantes traditions for Heine, has argued that the “freedom” motif of the Exodus story recounted in the Passover Haggadah provides the narrative trajectory of the first, Scott-influenced section of Heine’s fragment, which is then parodically superseded by the Cervantes-inspired chapter 3.68 The messianic hopes evoked in chapter 1, contends Rose, are jettisoned as Rabbi Abraham casts the silver Elijah cup into the Rhine. These hopes meet their

Wissenschaft des Judentums and Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach

­ arodic end in the figure of the renegade scion of the House of David, p Don Isaak Abarbanel. Rose concludes that the fragment thus remains within its original symbolic framework, now using parody to attack the bondage from which Heine’s protagonists seek to escape. Building upon Rose’s grasp of the fragment’s unity, it is my contention, however, that Heine’s reception of Cervantes’ ambivalent utopianism gives a different meaning to the Abarbanel figure and the “freedom” motif. The historical Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) is a figure rich in associations which open up numerous fields of meaning in Heine’s fragment.69 Heine’s research into the Abravanel family in conjunction with his historical novel was broad; it is clear, if one considers Heine’s notes and excerpts from the available histories, that he was drawn to ­Abravanel as a multivalent historical symbol. From Heine’s notes,70 it is difficult to say for certain which elements of the Abravanels’ history drew his attention. Was it their alleged descent from King David? Or the many examples of boundaries crossed and recrossed between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds? Heine noted that, at the end of his life, Isaac Abravanel regretted that he devoted too much of his early career to secular pursuits. Isaac’s son Jehuda is only the most famous example of an Abravanel who was supposed to have strayed and returned. Heine compresses the many historical attributes and legends about the Abravanels into one scarcely developed literary character. The fragmentary nature of Der Rabbi von Bacherach leaves Heine’s Abarbanel a figure packed with ambivalence and tension, a figure of thought for exile as well as of messianic hope, for baptism and assimilation as well as for a heroic Jewish world beyond the ghetto. As noted above, on a semantic level, “Don Isaak Abarbanel” is implicitly present already in the first chapter as author of a well-known commentary to the ­Passover-Haggadah.71 One could say that just as Abravanel’s commentary is printed in the margins of the Haggadah, Don Isaac is already present at the margins of Heine’s first chapter, and just as Abravanel’s commentary explains and deepens an appreciation of the story of persecution and liberation, Heine’s Abarbanel is the productive continuation of a historical dynamic already present in chapter 1. Heine’s Abarbanel is an overdetermined figure. Like Rabbi Abraham, he has studied at the rabbinical academy of Toledo, and thus stands for the promise of integration achieved through Bildung. His apostasy and

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rejection of both “Hebrew” and “Nazarine” stands in contrast to the “messianic” content inherent in his descent from King David, leaving open the possibility of return. Heine’s Abarbanel calls forth images of a Spanish-Jewish past of glorious cultural achievement and participation in secular life, yet also the uneasiness that comes with the knowledge of its end: Inquisition and expulsion. Heine’s apostate Don Isaac is a figure of thought for incomplete assimilation and secularization, an expression of the ambivalence of the first generation of emancipated Jews. All subsequent German-Jewish historical novels (and the historical personage of Isaac Abravanel would figure in many of them) would stress one or the other aspects of Heine’s ambivalent Spanish Jew. If anyone “learned history from Heine,” it was because his Der Rabbi von Bacherach bequeathed a vocabulary to subsequent writers which could express historical optimism as well as anxiety about the tenuous nature of Jewish integration. The imaginary geography of Heine’s narrative is an expression of his unfinished historical novel’s implicit conception of history. Rabbi Abraham flees the Judengasse of Bacherach only to reach the ghetto of Frankfurt. Don Isaac, the Jew who has left religion behind, is also found within the ghetto walls. The reader of Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach last sees Don Isaac on his way to enjoy a meal in Frankfurt’s ghetto in 1489. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain—the greatest catastrophe to befall the Jews since the destruction of the Temple—is yet to come. Three years later, the apostate Abravanel would share the same fate as Rabbi Abraham: that of a refugee for whom to return to his native city would mean to risk death. The final irony of Heine’s fragment is that neither the rabbi nor the apostate is able to transcend the ghetto, and Rabbi Abraham’s flight leads only from one confined space to another. The persecutions of the Jews—which the blood libel of 1840 showed to be still current—have formed a community of fate which even the baptized cannot escape: this is the conception of history which underlies Der Rabbi von Bacherach. Taken as an analogy of literary history, it might also be said to be the dynamic which links Heine’s unfinished novel with the minority culture analyzed in the next chapter.

Th re e Minority Culture in the Age of the Nation Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach were hardly “minority” authors. Indeed, they were two of the most widely read writers in nineteenth-century Germany. Both adapted the new popular medium of the historical novel to Jewish history in the context of their youthful engagements with the causes of emancipation and Jewish modernization, but Spinoza and Der Rabbi von Bacherach did not play major roles in their authors’ literary reputations during their lifetimes. Auerbach was best known to German readers for his Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Village Tales from the Black Forest; 1843–53), Heine best known for his poetry. In the Jewish world, by contrast, historical fiction held a special significance. It was a literary vehicle for dissimilation, a site where Jewish authors sought to write Jewish history into German history and into new notions of universal history, while at the same time redefining their cultural-religious heritage in modernity. Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach was not published until 1840, so a reviewer for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (AJZ ) could, in 1837, greet Auerbach’s Spinoza as “the first Jewish novel.” Significantly, 1837 also marked the beginning of publication for the AZJ, the first widely distributed Jewish newspaper, edited by the liberal rabbi and author Ludwig Philippson (1811–89).1 Prominent in the first issues of this paper was Die Marannen (The Marranos; 1837), a serialized historical novel by Ludwig’s brother Phöbus Philippson (1807–70). From the 1830s to the 1930s, dozens of historical novels targeting a German-Jewish minority public were written (including not a few by Ludwig Philippson himself) and published in papers like the AZJ. The names of the Philippsons and other writers of Jewish historical fiction in nineteenth-century Germany are still largely unknown to German

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literary history. Yet their works document an important parallel history of nineteenth-century German culture. A modern Jewish public sphere first emerged in early nineteenth-century Germany and the reimagining of the Jewish past in popular historical novels played a leading role in the minority culture to which it gave voice.

Minority Culture and the German-Jewish Public Sphere The concepts of “minority public sphere” and “minority cultural memory” do not include all German authors of Jewish origin who wrote on Jewish historical themes. Beyond major writers like Heine and Auerbach, there are notable examples of prolific Jewish authors of popular historical fiction who wrote for broad German audiences in nineteenth-century Germany, alternating chapters from Jewish history with German or Habsburg patriotic themes. Eduard Breier (1811–86), an Austrian Jew, wrote twenty-nine novels on subjects as varied as the Hussites, the Battle of Wagram, the court of Emperor Joseph II, and the false messiahs Shabbati Zevi and Jakob Frank. Another popular author, Max Ring (1817–1901), based in Breslau and, later, Berlin, was a well-established writer of historical novels on subjects from John Milton to the seventeenth-century Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg. (A poem by Max Ring inscribed on Heinrich von Kleist’s gravestone was notoriously removed by the Nazis in 1936.) Yet Ring also published Das Haus Hillel: Historischer Roman aus der Zeit der Zerstörung Jerusalems (The House of Hillel: Historical Novel from the Era of Jerusalem’s Destruction) in the pages of the Deutsche Roman-Zeitung, an influential Berlin-based literary journal that featured writers like Raabe and Freytag alongside popular historical fiction.2 However, Das Haus Hillel is merely a Jewish-themed work of historical adventure and romance. Ring’s portrait of Judaism in the Roman era centers on a fictional Roman Jew, named Ruben, who travels to Jerusalem; falls in love with Mirjam, a descendent of Rabbi Hillel; fights with the Jews against the Romans; is enslaved; is freed miraculously when he discovers a treasure; returns to Mirjam after a relationship with a mystically inclined Nazerene woman, but is rejected by traditional Jews and Christians alike. The implicit assimila-

Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

tionist message of Ring’s pulp tragedy—the reader sheds tears for the hero who finds love (but not social acceptance) beyond religious divisions—is well matched to the success of a German-Jewish writer who reaches the pages of the Deutsche Roman-Zeitung. Unlike bestsellers by Breier and Ring, however, the novels of Philippson and Lehmann were read almost exclusively within the German-Jewish milieu, and like the novels of Heine and Auerbach, they engaged with central themes of Jewish communal identity rather than with the fates of individuals.3 The emergence of a minority public sphere is a by-product of acculturation: at the same time that the Jews of the German-­speaking lands increasingly adopted the language and culture of their non-Jewish neighbors, they redefined their Jewish identities. The ­German-Jewish public sphere took off with the development of Jewish publishing and newspaper culture. Although Sulamith, the first German-language Jewish journal, had been founded in 1806 and appeared irregularly until 1848, the first major Jewish newspaper in German with a continuous publication began in 1837: Philippson’s AZJ. German-Jewish newspapers mushroomed after 1840, galvanized in part by the Damascus affair (the shock of renewed ritual murder accusations in a new, enlightened century spurred a new interest in Jewish affairs).4 Although traditional Jews were slower in adopting the new media, neo-Orthodox newspapers began publication in the late 1850s, emulating the format and style of the reform-minded papers as they criticized liberal views. Literature was a central concern both of the liberal AZJ and of neoOrthodox papers like Der Israelit, founded in 1860 by the rabbi and novelist Markus Lehmann (1831–90).5 A serialized historical novel appeared in the second issue of the AZJ, and many more were to f­ ollow.6 Although the German-Jewish press devoted space to a variety of literary genres and reviewed works by the leading German writers of the day (Jewish and non-Jewish), it was above all the didactic value of historical fiction for Jewish readers and its apologetic value vis-à-vis non-Jewish readers which was extolled by Jewish newspapers of all denominational stripes. The establishment of Jewish publication societies was another key phase in the development of German-Jewish minority culture. Together with the historian Isaak Markus Jost and Adolf Jellinek (a preacher and scholar in Leipzig from 1845 to 1856, later chief rabbi of

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Vienna), Ludwig Philippson formed the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Society for the Promotion of Israelite Literature), which in 1855 began distributing scholarly historical and religious studies as well as fiction to its subscribers.7 In 1858, the book club had 3,600 subscribers and by 1865 had disseminated 182,000 copies of fiftyfive titles.8 This constituted a substantial public, given that in 1850, the number of Jews in Germany and the Habsburg empire was about 530,000 (roughly 1.3 percent of the total population),9 and the fact that traditional Jews were unlikely to subscribe to a liberal publication society. An 1867 subscription list illustrates the institute’s program and the breadth of its readership.10 Historical novels comprised about onefifth of the titles listed. The twenty-six hundred subscribers included a large number of teachers and rabbis, and also book dealers and lending libraries. Many ordered multiple copies and these works thus made their way into school, community, and private-circulating libraries. The subscribers came mostly from cities and small towns across Germany and the Habsburg empire, but also from France, Russia, and from as far away as San Francisco. These German-language historical novels thus had a tremendous reception throughout the Jewish world in the nineteenth-century—a reception that extended beyond national boundaries. It should also be pointed out that “minority” historical novels were not only authored by central figures in the Jewish world like Ludwig Philippson and Marcus Lehmann, who had a large institutional base through newspapers associated with German Jewry’s main “liberal” and “traditional” factions. Hermann Reckendorf (1825–75), for example, an Orientalist who taught Hebrew and Arabic at Heidelberg University, published his five-volume historical novel Die Geheimnisse der Juden (The Mysteries of the Jews; 1856–57) independently. This chapter will present a portrait of this minority public sphere and illustrate how this literary genre constructed a new Jewish selfunderstanding in the age of emancipation. Popular historical culture was a vehicle for German-Jewish dissimilation. The historical novel about Jewish history was a literary site where Jewish authors sought to write Jewish history into European history (and thus into new Western notions of universal history). These fictional constructions of the Jewish past created paradigms of Jewish identity for an age of emancipation and embourgoisement.

Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The first section of this chapter will contrast Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach with Philippson’s Die Marannen to illustrate how the ­German-Jewish minority culture exemplified by the latter author could use the same vocabulary of figures from Jewish history as did Heine, albeit with a different aim: to create a normative, stable Jewish identity that could hope to participate in a project of integration. The next sections analyze how minority “popular” culture—historical novels aimed at a Jewish public—established patterns of identity in politics, culture, and gender roles, often through intertextual links to the German “high” culture (especially the classical drama of Schiller and Goethe). Finally, this chapter discusses the (non-)reception of this minority literature by leading Jewish intellectuals and by literary criticism in the non-Jewish press. It then looks at what became of this mid-nineteenthcentury German-Jewish minority culture around 1900 (considering the rise of Zionism as well as Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism and other cultural-political factors in imperial Germany), as well as how GermanJewish minority culture was transformed into a Jewish national culture through Hebrew and Yiddish translations.

An Abravanel for Every Occasion: Minority Culture as the Domestication of Jewish History Heine’s fragment of a historical novel concludes with myriad unresolved tensions. The crucial questions of Jewish modernization—the problematic of conversion, community, and the limits of secularization—are left open, as the protagonist Rabbi Abraham confronts the apostate Isaak Abarbanel. Der Rabbi von Bacherach outlines a modern historical dynamic shaped by the competing forces of religious tradition and secular culture, a world in which the possibility of an inclusive new social order beyond ethnic and religious difference is clouded by the specter of a medieval age that is never quite past, of murderous persecution which would revoke the liberation promised by secularization. Heine’s Abarbanel remains an ambivalent figure: a delightfully debauched lighthearted renegade who might nonetheless one day return to tradition or even emerge as a sword-bearing secular messiah, a heroic contrast to the passive “ghetto Jews.” Heine’s

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incomplete historical novel thus points toward both catastrophe and redemption as the narrative concludes on a dissonant note: Don Isaak Abarbanel remains an unrepentant sensualist, offering his knightly services to Beautiful Sara as he sits down with Rabbi Abraham to enjoy a meal in the Frankfurt ghetto in 1489, while the coming historical disaster of 1492 casts a shadow over the entire Jewish world. Don Isaac’s quest for an identity beyond traditional religious norms evokes the ambivalence of Don Quixote, a literary figure who represents both utopian striving and carnevalesque failure. Der Rabbi von Bacherach thus posits an insecure space for the minority history it narrates: the modernizing Jew who would transcend the ghetto is paradoxically led back to the confines of its walls. As in Berthold Auerbach’s novel Spinoza, the spatial imagination of the Jewish historical novel confirms Jewish history as a chronicle of incomplete secularization: the “heroic” proto-modernizers from the Jewish past never succeed in leaving the ghetto behind. In the face of impending historical tragedy—the coming catastrophe of 1492—neither Rabbi Abraham (the representative of a harmony between Enlightenment and religion) nor Don Isaac (the advocate of secularism) seem able to promise resolution to Heine’s narrative. Yet on the pages of another work of historical fiction, Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen, the narrative oppositions left unsettled in Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach are more fully developed—and ultimately reconciled. Beginning in May 1837 (that is to say, three years before the publication of Heine’s fragment), Philippson’s tale appeared as a serialized novella in the first major nineteenth-century Jewish newspaper, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.11 The parallels between the two works are considerable. Philippson’s tale begins with the siege of Granada in 1492. The action in Philippson’s novella is centered on a young Jewish woman named Dinah who loses her family and is taken under the protection of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s financier, Don Isaac Abravanel. In Philippson’s tale, this (historical) leader of the Jews of Spain is presented as a benevolent father figure. In Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach, the figure of “Don Isaak Abarbanel” seems to combine elements of two historical figures, merging Jehuda Abravanel (also known as Leone Ebreo, ca. 1460–ca. 1535), the humanist author of the Dialoghi d’amore, with his father, the pious court Jew and Bible

Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

commentator Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508), in order to form one single fictional persona.12 In Phöbus Philippson’s historical novella, by contrast, both Don Isaak and Jehuda Abravanel are developed as characters. Although no evidence has yet been uncovered that would demonstrate that Philippson and Heine knew of each other’s work before 1840,13 ­Heine’s sensualist Don Isaak would certainly recognize a kindred spirit in Philippson’s Jehuda Abravanel, but not in his father and namesake, the devout leader of his people, Isaac Abravanel: “Long, serious study of his nation’s religious traditions and extensive experience of the world had taught the father only the serious side of life. Jehuda was more familiar with the sweet sounds of Spanish poetry and with popular literature; he wanted to draw sweet honey from every flower of joy.”14 Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen is a parable of a prodigal son. A ­ lthough Jehuda never rejects Judaism, in Philippson’s novella he “paid no attention to the forms of his belief, much less to the ceremonies of divine service.”15 This is, of course, a serious misrepresentation of the historical Jehuda Abravanel (Leone Ebreo), a pious Jew who lamented the forced baptism of his own lost son (also named Isaac) in his ­Hebrew poem “Telunah al ha-zeman” (A Complaint Against the Times).16 But, like Heine in Der Rabbi von Bacherach, Phöbus Philippson draws upon the complex history of the Abravanel clan (their history calls to mind such diverse themes and associations as “knowledge of secular culture,” “integration,” “exile,” “messianism and faith,” and “forced baptism”), in order to explore tensions between traditional Jewish piety and a new openness to non-Jewish literature and thought. In Philippson’s hands, the contrast between two generations of Jewish philosophers becomes a melodrama of modernization,17 where Jewish youth can be led astray if they misunderstand secular culture as an invitation to sensualism and assimilation. Although Leone Ebreo’s D ­ ialoghi d’amore was above all a work of Neoplatonic religious thought, Phöbus Philippson’s novella makes this Portuguese-Italian-Jewish Renaissance philosopher a figure for nineteenth-century German-Jewish anxieties about conversion, secularization, and materialism. In Philippson’s novella, the beautiful Dinah rejects a Christian suitor and returns the straying Jehuda to the religion of his fathers. The Jewish people escape the threat of destruction, and the survival of faith and

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family is secured. Philippson’s affirmative “happy end” contrasts with the aporia of tradition versus secularization with which Heine’s fragment concludes, yet the two stories share countless structural elements: characters (the Abravanel family); the Spanish setting; and, most importantly, the themes of persecution and conversion, thin veils for the questions of integration and anti-Semitism that confronted nineteenthcentury German Jewry. In contrast to Heine’s tale, where the destabilizing figure of “Don Isaak Abarbanel” threatens to upset religious and social convention with his blasphemous embrace of the Phoenician fertility goddess Astarte and his suspicious overtures to Rabbi Abraham’s wife, Philippson’s Die Marannen offers an entirely different portrait of a historical figure with the same name, a pious patriarch who presides over the continuity of traditional family and spiritual values as Dinah and Jehuda are united in Corfu, their refuge from persecution in Spain. The publication of Heine’s fragment in 1840 provoked a telling critique from Ludwig Philippson. In the pages of the very newspaper that had launched his brother’s novella Die Marannen three years earlier, Philippson pondered the motives behind the ordinarily irreverent ­Heine’s portrayal of Jewish religious customs, and considered Heine’s appropriation of the name of the revered Bible commentator and court financier “Isaac Abravanel” for the audacious apostate portrayed in his Der Rabbi von Bacherach: What is the point of this endless regurgitation of old Jewish customs? . . . Have you not enough things to ridicule in your flat, characterless worlds, you enervated libertines?—But wait! To lecture Mr. ­Heine on morals would be too ridiculous. . . . (Heine) introduces his Jewish-Christian heathen figure, in which he apotheosizes himself, as someone who only enters the Jewish quarter to eat cholent. It’s appropriate for Heine to portray such a hero, and we won’t spoil his joy in these sorts of masterpieces and self-stylizations. Who knows how long ­Heine has carried on this sort of blasphemy? That here in this fragment he calls himself by the honorable name of Don Isaac Abravanel will be forgiven him by that great shade. Probably (Heine) has confused him with the legendary prodigal son of Isaac Abravanel. Mr. Heine can so easily be mistaken for a prodigal son.18

Philippson’s mocking, hostile review underscores the cultural agenda of this mainstream Jewish figure. For Philippson, historical fiction was

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no mere pretext for aesthetic flights of fancy (nor for any radical political agenda), but rather a potent didactic instrument which was to be put to uses deemed appropriate by the rabbi and literary pedagogue. As was outlined in the previous chapter, Heine’s background research for his fragmentary historical novel points to an ambivalent r­ eception of the Abravanel figure, an ambivalence which illustrates the complexity that the image of Sephardic Jewry held for German Jews in the age of emancipation. Yet Philippson saw no room for ambiguity in the representation of the past. For Ludwig Philippson, historical fiction should be a moral exemplum, a role model for youth.19 The turn to the past was to serve presentist aims. If, for Heine, “Isaac Abravanel” could be a literary figure of thought for the anxieties of emancipation—the inability of even apostate Jews to escape the fate of the ghetto Jew—then Phöbus Philippson could use the same figure to symbolically sublimate those very tensions, using the historical novel to imagine a secure space for a modern Jewish culture built upon religious idealism and a restored bourgeois family. Ludwig Philippson’s review reads Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach as a self-portrait of a renegade, but implies that Heine’s fragment is subsumed by his brother’s account of the renegade’s redemption in Die Marannen.20 German-Jewish minority culture constructed a narrative of Jewish history which could (it imagined) conciliate and domesticate the apostate, the modern self wounded by the unsuccessful attempt to transcend its origins. In the age of Enlightenment, of the encounter with secular culture, and of the attractions of assimilation, both the minority historical novel and minority literary criticism created fictional spaces in which the forces of modernization led to the transformation and stabilization of difference under a new image of patriarchal authority.

Littérature Mineure or Art Moyen? Understanding the Role of Literature in the Minority Public Sphere Phöbus Philippson’s 1837 novella ushered in a new phenomenon. The feuilleton novels which appeared in the popular Jewish press (which mushroomed after 1840) were evidence of how a growing Jewish popular culture was adapting a secular literary genre to create a new

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German-Jewish identity for an age of emancipation. In the early nineteenth century, the forms of cultural expression dominant in the German-Jewish press harmonized with the political and social aims of a Jewish minority which strove for integration into the German middle class. As the historian Jacob Katz succinctly summarized in the twentieth century, “Jews have not assimilated into ‘the German people,’ but into a certain layer of it, the newly emerged middle class.”21 But at the same time that Jews increasingly adopted the culture of their non-Jewish environment in nineteenth-century Germany, they also developed new Jewish traditions, what the historian Shulamit Volkov terms a two-tiered system consisting of a “great” tradition of intellectual culture (Wissenschaft des Judentums) and a “small tradition,” the “Jewish version of German middle-class culture.”22 On both elite and popular levels, the turn to the past redefined Jewish identity for the needs of emancipation. In the German-Jewish historical novel, minority popular culture, Volkov’s “small tradition,” became a vehicle for “entrance” into European bourgeois society.23 Yet studies of minority culture provide an inadequate theoretical framework for an analysis of a minority literature that emulates the aims of the dominant society, recasting minority historical memory for an agenda of integration and embourgoisement. Studies have focused instead on the subversive potential inherent in minority writing. Anna Kazumi Stahl, for example, in her comparative study of Argentine-Jewish, Japanese-American, and Turkish-German literatures, invokes Homi Bhabha’s notion of “hybridity” and the “counternarrative of the nation” to uncover “what minority formations offer in the way of shifts in the paradigm of monocultural identity and alternatives to monological thinking.”24 Similarly, Scott Spector’s study of the Prague circle extends the arguments of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in order to demonstrate how the writing strategies attributed to “minor literatures” undermine nationalist political fantasies of a “rooted” (“­reterritorialized”) literature.25 The historical novels of the ­Philippsons, Markus Lehmann, and other mainstream Jewish figures are evidence of a different phenomenon, however, one just as essential for an understanding of minority self-conceptions in the age of the nation-state. The hybrid formations which Stahl terms “pocket-cultures” often become zones where minority identity seeks to transform itself

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in harmony with hegemonic cultural norms. Side by side with the phenomenon of assimilation, the wholesale adoption of majority culture by a minority,26 new cultural spheres emerge that strive for the extension rather than the subversion of the project of a national identity. “Dissimilation” creates minority cultures which are also spaces where the nation is imagined. The discourse of minority literature as established by recent criticism, concerned with seizing the liberating potential in minority articulations, falters at a conceptualization of ways in which minority cultures can themselves participate in master narratives of identity in the bourgeois era. Rather than exhibiting “a similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture . . . [the] Manichean allegory that seems the central trope not only of colonialist discourse but also of Western humanism [and] . . . which seeks to marginalize [all minority culture],”27 German-Jewish minority culture embraced as its own the ideals of Bildung and embourgeoisement. Nineteenth-century Jewish writers related to German literary tradition in ways that precluded a conception of minority writing as inherently oppositional.28 Homi Bhabha’s identification of a rupture between the “pedagogical” and “performative” modes of culture neglects to take account of ways the two can coincide.29 Bhabha employs Freud’s concept of “ambivalence” to expose the marginalizing realities of a “humanist” ideology that “desires a reformed, recognizable Other,” yet Bhabha sees “ambivalence” exclusively as a unidirectional function of a hegemonic discourse which marks difference as it seeks to produce identity, foreclosing the critical dialogic possibilities inherent in such a concept.30 Whereas Bhabha’s rhetoric might be adequate for analyses of racism (not limited to colonial and postcolonial contexts), it cannot grasp a minority consciousness that recognizes more in the discourse of humanism than double-dealing. Similarly, as Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi suggests, to assimilate all minority literatures to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of littérature mineure is to run the risk of confounding “the condition and the gesture of exile.”31 It is precisely because such theories of minority culture are appropriate where resistance and struggle are of the essence that they should not be generalized, their vocabulary distended to encompass all minority literatures. Rather than construct a genealogy of oppositional identities that makes of nineteenth-­century ­German

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Jewry an archetype of transvalued marginality, a relational model of cultural production permits German-Jewish minority culture to be seen in its historical context and can form a more solid basis for an observation of general and emerging patterns in minority formations. Pierre Bourdieu’s literary sociology offers such a model. Rather than an example of littérature mineure, the German-Jewish historical novel is more a special case of what Bourdieu terms art moyen, a middlebrow mass-consumption form aimed at a “target audience.”32 As the following analysis will illustrate, the German-Jewish historical novel adapted popular cultural forms such as melodrama and the historical romance in order to carve out a space for a new minority identity. Instead of subverting the dominant cultural paradigms, German-Jewish minority writers such as Philippson and Lehmann contributed to their expansion by participating in the creation of a minority niche within the contemporary field of cultural production. Moreover, by creating minority “traditions” in the spirit of an emerging national culture, minority culture became a means of acquiring the “cultural capital” that was prerequisite for integration in the age of Bildung.33

Paradigms of Minority Identity in the Jewish Historical Novel Culture: Writing Jewish History in the Margins of the Weimar Classics The first published German-Jewish historical novel—Berthold Auer­ bach’s Spinoza—set a precedent that creates a minority literature through intertext, forging a link between a “popular” genre and the emerging national culture of the German classical canon. The historical novel becomes the means by which Jewish history can be written into European culture, as Goethe’s incomplete literary project of a meeting of the Wandering Jew with Spinoza is transformed in Auerbach’s novel into a fantasy where Enlightenment and redemption fuse and can be accomplished without the price of conversion. The German-Jewish historical novel is thus a sphere where minority identity is reimagined for the project of an inclusive narrative of the Kulturnation. The telos of Jewish history could now harmonize with a liberal conception of a universal bourgeois culture.34

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German-Jewish historical novelists inscribed Jewish history in the margins of German classical literature—historical drama above all. In Ludwig Philippson’s 1867 novel Jakob Tirado, for example, the text of Jewish history merges with Goethe’s Egmont. Tirado, a historical figure, was a Portuguese converso who returned to Judaism and fled to Brussels in the late sixteenth century. In the 1590s, he returned to Portugal, gathered together a group of secret Jews who sought to flee the Inquisition, and left for Amsterdam to found the first Sephardic synagogue there. But interspersed with this historical material is a poetic variation. In Philippson’s novel, Jakob Tirado has to flee the Spanish Habsburgs, who rule in Brussels, because he is involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the hated representative of Inquisition and reaction, the Duke of Alba. Philippson writes his fictional Jewish history between the lines of Goethe’s play, linking Jakob Tirado to Goethe’s arch-­ villain. Tirado explains why he became involved in the plot against the Duke of Alba: “Not only to further the cause of my ancestors and to avenge their fate, not merely to liberate the scattered branches of my people and to freely practice my faith—for all these reasons, yes, but all the more to free humanity from this plague.”35 “Ask not what the Kulturnation can do for you, ask what you can do for the Kultur­nation”—this might well have been the motto of the Jewish writer in nineteenth-century Germany. German-Jewish minority culture answered the call to freedom contained in Egmont’s final speech: “reißt den Wall der Tyrannei zusammen [!] [tear down the wall of tyranny (!)].” If Goethe’s 1787 play seems to hold up the sixteenthcentury Dutch struggle against religious and political reaction as a cultural-political ideal for Germany,36 then Ludwig Philippson’s novel confirms this ideal of a tolerant northern European state as a symbol of the Germany into which German Jews hoped to be emancipated. As German historical dramas were echoed in Jewish historical novels, the stage was set for scenes of recognition and misrecognition. Tales of Jewish religious perseverance were authenticated as part and parcel of the true agenda of the emerging canon of German national culture. Yet the fusion of historical symbols was not always smooth. Markus Lehmann’s 1873 tale of secret Jews in eighteenth-century Spain, Die Familie y Aguilar (The Family y Aguilar), pinpoints one of these fissures. Lehmann’s novel fictionalizes the figure of Diego d’Aguilar,

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a Spanish converso who returned to Judaism and moved to Vienna in the early eighteenth century.37 Secret Jews elude the brutal Inquisition to emigrate to freer climates where they can openly profess their religion. But while most of Lehmann’s poetic license involves spicing up the historical material with melodramatic clichés (dramatic escapes, miraculous reunions), he also inserts literary allusions which reveal that points of contact between Jewish cultural memory and German cultural symbols could also be open wounds, sites for dissimilation: The coach drove through the merciless, sun-scorched plains of New Castile. The passenger, an elegant cleric, asked the driver, “Shall we arrive soon?” “That building, Señor,” he answered, “which glistens in the evening sun, is the royal palace of Aranjuez.” Aranjuez! Made famous by Schiller’s play Don Carlos. Don Carlos, however, the son of Philipp II, was not the hero of freedom and virtue which the fantasy of the German poet made him out to be. The real Don Carlos is of interest to Jewish history because of his presence at the Valladolid ­auto-da-fé. There he swore an oath to persecute heretics and to support the Inquisition. Then he lit the pyre with his own hands, upon which fourteen persons were burned alive, and many others, too, after they had been strangled. That is the historical Don Carlos, who has nothing in common with Schiller’s fantasy image except his title and his name.38

From the perspective of Jewish history, the historical Don Carlos was a sinister contrast to his idealization on the German classic stage. Yet the critique of Don Carlos in Lehmann’s “minority” novel points to a notion of an inclusive cultural ideal that could unite a “popular” historical novel with Schiller’s historical drama. In Lehmann’s novel, minority memory is stirred by the sufferings of its martyrs, but this memory simultaneously clears a unique path for minority participation in the larger narrative of German “high” culture. Lehmann’s Die Familie y Aguilar is a commentary on Don Carlos that infuses Schiller’s appeal for democracy and religious tolerance (“Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit!” exclaims Carlos’s friend Posa to the king, “Grant freedom of thought!”) with the specificity of the Jewish past. Schiller’s play acquires new meaning for a minority audience who can read in its historical symbolism echoes of their own struggle to preserve religious identity as they entered what they hoped was a new era of tolerance and acceptance.

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Sephardic-Jewish history offered German-Jewish writers rich and complex themes which could resonate well with their attempts to define new Jewish identities in the age of German nationalism. German-Jewish integrationists could see the convivencia, the coexistence of Jews, Christians, and Muslims as a historical illustration of the German Enlightenment’s liberal fictions: as Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) come to life. The flourishing of Hebrew poetry in this “golden age,” as well as openness of Jewish thinkers to Greek philosophy (in the Arabic language) and the spectacular participation of Jews in Spanish and Portuguese political life became a model for what German Jews hoped that German Bildung would bring them. At the same time, dissimilating Jews could draw upon the negative symbolism of the Sephardic past as they enthusiastically sought to participate more fully in German society. The Inquisition and the expulsion of 1492 could serve Jews as an admonition of the virtues of religious perseverance, and might remind non-Jews of the evils of coerced baptism (dramatizing the social and economic pressure to assimilate in nineteenth-century Germany with the murderous fanaticism of the Inquisition). The fact that GermanJewish writers could find therein a common historical vocabulary with now-canonical works such as Goethe’s Egmont or Schiller’s Don Carlos made the Sephardic theme all the more attractive. The marriage of Jewish history to this particular narrative of the Kulturnation raises an interesting question about minority cultural memory in the context of nineteenth-century nationalism. In Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays, the Spanish Habsburgs (historical figures such as King Philip II and his agent the Duke of Alba) are demonized, and, conversely, the Dutch Protestants are romanticized. Did the GermanJewish focus on themes of Inquisition and religious persecution somehow imply or encourage an alliance with the sort of anti-Catholic German nationalism which would come to the fore during the Kultur­ kampf of the 1870s? Was Sephardic symbolism more convenient for German-Jewish cultural memory because it harmonized with powerful conservative views that held Protestantism to be an essential component of German national identity?39 Eighteenth-century German Enlighteners such as Schiller and Goethe certainly dressed their symbols of intolerance in Catholic garb,40 and conversion novels with a Gothic or adventure flavor (such as Naubert’s Josef Mendez Pinto; 1802) often

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used the Spanish Inquisition as a background for their suffering Protestant protagonists. To be sure, popular German historical novels of the nineteenth century that were set in Spain often colored the romance of the fall of Boabdil’s Granada with pronounced anti-Catholic portrayals. An example is Arthur Stahl’s Die Tochter der Alhambra (The Daughter of the Alhambra), which first appeared in the Deutsche Roman Zeitung in 1868. A conventional love story that uses Spain’s mix of Gothic, Jewish, and Islamic cultures as a backdrop, Stahl’s “ecumenical” happy end (a church wedding) is offset by negative images of priests.41 But German-Jewish writers seem to have been motivated neither by a particular anti-Catholic animus nor by a desire to forge a tactical alliance with Bismark’s Kulturkampf. German Jews generally opposed anti-Catholic measures during the Kulturkampf, the most notable example being Eduard Lasker’s and Ludwig Bamberger’s dissent from the National Liberals in 1874.42 Ludwig Philippson was evenhanded in his assessment of Judaism’s relation to Christian sects. In two political essays, from 1861 and 1868, Philippson lamented the reactionary position of Pius IX in the Mortara case (regarding a Jewish child who had been abducted by Catholic conversionists in 1858), the persistence of allegations of host desecration, and the celebrations in Bavaria of passion plays with anti-Jewish content, remarking that “the Protestant church has never attacked Jews with the fire and sword of the Inquisition.”43 But Philippson also noted that the concept of the “Christian state” was Protestant in origin, and criticized missionary efforts directed at Jews. Thus, although Spanish-Jewish themes might possibly have sounded anti-Catholic notes for some readers in imperial Germany, German-Jewish writers stressed the inclusive, unifying ideals of German classic writers. Tellingly, the term Philippson uses to contrast with Catholic intolerance is “a civilization which encompasses humanity [menschheitliche Civilisation].”44

Gender and the Family: Jewish History as Bürgerliches Trauerspiel If, as the previous section illustrates, nineteenth-century Jewish authors could use the historical novel to inscribe minority history into national culture through the use of the historical dramas of Goethe

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and Schiller as intertexts, it was through the adaptation of another form of German classical drama that a minority’s “internal history,” the domestic sphere of gender roles, could be brought into line with dominant bourgeois norms as a minority literature sought to position itself in relation to national culture. The melodramatic narratives of nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novels adapt scenarios from the bourgeois tragedy play, reimagining the Jewish family as modern anxieties about assimilation are projected backward in time. As historians with an awareness of the inseparability of women’s history from the social history of Jewish embourgeoisement have turned their attention to the Jewish family in the nineteenth century, crucial intersections of literature, gender construction, and minority identity have emerged. Based on an extensive study of memoirs, Marion Kaplan has pointed to the ways in which Jewish women functioned as important mediators of German culture in the private sphere, as consumers of both the “high” culture of the German classics and the middle-brow literature of the Gartenlaube.45 Paula Hyman has stressed the tremendous changes in gender roles brought about by Jewish integration in nineteenth-century western Europe, noting that male-dominated Jewish society frequently blamed Jewish women for assimilation and the abandonment of Jewish culture.46 In response to both the attractions of cultural integration and apprehensions about assimilation, popular Jewish historical novels created new myths that fashioned women as the subjects of Jewish history. Patterning minority culture on both archetypes from Jewish history and the emerging classical canon of bourgeois German culture, nineteenth-century German Jews simultaneously sought integration into German society and the preservation of Jewish distinctiveness, as the Jewish private sphere was transformed by an appeal to (invented) tradition. Women became the focal points of (and an intended audience for) these ­traditionalizing (in the sense of seeking to invest contemporary values with historical legitimacy) historical narratives that sought a position from which the Jewish minority could aspire to the cultural capital of German middle-class society. The heroines of the GermanJewish historical novel become the subjects of Jewish integration: the dramatized defense of the Jewish religion was legitimized with a vocabulary established on the German stage.

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The German-Jewish historical novel could draw on both “high” and popular literary forms as it fashioned new roles for historical heroines. Here again, Walter Scott’s novels had a far-reaching influence. The scenario at the conclusion of Scott’s Ivanhoe had a special significance for Jewish writers: the Jewess Rebecca announces to the Saxon ­Rowena that she will not convert (“I may not change the faith of my fathers like a garment unsuited to the climate in which I dwell!”) and that she will instead leave twelfth-century England for the Granada of King Boabdil.47 This historical anachronism became an important symbolic constellation for Jewish writers: as Scott’s Rebecca leaves ­England for fifteenth-century Spain and Scott’s novels cause a sensation in ­nineteenth-century Europe, Spain becomes the stage of Jewish history and its theme becomes the drama of the Jewish daughter. But to follow the career of the “Rebecca” paradigm in the German-Jewish historical novel is to uncover a complex pattern of cultural transfer and crossinfluence between “high” and “low” cultures and between ­England and Germany: German-Jewish historical novelists are inspired by Scott, Scott was inspired by Goethe’s historical dramas, and Goethe’s plays are indebted to the rediscovery of Shakespeare in the Sturm und Drang era. Jewish writers could draw upon a variety of literary ­models: from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to Lessing’s Nathan der Weise to the Bible. What I wish to argue here is that in its adaptation of European literary models to Jewish history in a bourgeois age, the German-­Jewish historical novel could strike both the “high” registers of Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy plays and the “low” registers of their melodramatic adaptations.48 By shifting the drama of Jewish history to the drama of the Jewish daughter, these historical novels molded Jewish history to literary paradigms that mirrored the cultural ambitions of a minority in an age of integration. The domestication of history, its reduction to the family drama, was a staple of bourgeois drama.49 In the Jewish historical novel, women are cast as exemplary guardians of tradition and virtue. As in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, the daughter is to be the agent of a moral virtue which is to be defended at all costs, including the sacrifice of the daughter’s very life. In Hermann Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden (The Mysteries of the Jews), this scenario converges with traditional Jewish notions of martyrdom. The frame narrative of Reckendorf’s five-volume family saga

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of the Abravanel clan (told through the patriarchs’ testaments) opens in Morocco in 1839. The sultan, cast as the archetype of an “Oriental despot,” blockades the Jewish quarter in order to extort contributions for Abd-el-Kadr’s rebellion against the French. His minions search the home of Jehuda Abravanel, scion of King David and Isaac Abravanel, and attempt to abduct Jehuda’s daughter for the harem. A commander describes the scene to the sultan: “One, who declared he was the fiancé of the girl, raged like a lion. After we overpowered the others and he recognized the senselessness of resistance, he grabbed one of my servants’ yatagan [a short dagger which Orientals carried in their belts] and stabbed the girl, speaking these words: ‘Daughter of King David, go in innocence and worthy of our ancestors to heaven!’ Then he stabbed himself.”50 The language of the martyr diverges from the “classic” Ashkenazic traditional conception of kiddush ha-shem in that it appeals to ancestral honor rather than recalling the ceremonial offerings of the Temple.51 Indeed it is more evocative of images of ­heroic sacrifice from nationalist war novels, yet the scene draws upon ­Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy play as well as Jewish tradition in establishing the virtuous daughter as the subject of Jewish history. Moral virtue merges with religious identity as the melodramatic scene affirms the latter with the cultural code of the German classic. Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen offers a more extended image of the model Jewish heroine. The story begins where Scott’s Ivanhoe leaves off: with the siege of Boabdil’s Granada in 1492. At the center of the story is a Jewish family composed of the eighteen-year-old beauty Dinah and her elderly father, Nissa. Dinah and Nissa are portrayed as an island of domestic virtue amid the chaos of besieged Granada, where the rapacious hunger of the mob threatens to escalate into an attack on the Jewish community. The opening passages of Die Marannen paint a quaint familial idyll; Nissa’s house shows evidence of “die häusliche Sorgfalt eines weiblichen Wesens [the domestic care of a female presence]” (7). Beyond good housekeeping, Dinah’s duty is to console her despairing father through her faith: “‘Father,’ said Dinah admonishingly, ‘have you forgotten the words of the Psalmist: “I was young and have grown old, but never have I seen the righteous abandoned nor his child searching for bread”’” (8). Phöbus Philippson was no literary master and Die Marannen is a panoply of middle-brow

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literary clichés. Hearts pound as Alonzo declares his love for Dinah, tears fall when Dinah cries, “The cross of religion stands between us” (57), and sighs are heaved when a third character interrupts the scene and bursts in with news of the conquistadores latest outrage. The name “Dinah” evokes the biblical Dinah, Jacob and Leah’s daughter who is raped by the uncircumcised Shechem (Gen. 30:21). Philippson’s Dinah adapts a biblical paradigm to the standard scenario of the bourgeois melodrama, with the Christian knight taking the place of the rapacious prince. The sexual menace posed by the outsider endangers family honor above all: as the hearts pound, a portrait of Dinah’s father falls to the ground. In the biblical narrative, Shechem is willing to be circumcised in order to marry Dinah. Yet in Philippson’s historical fantasy, Dinah is the driving force which brings the Jewish father and son together. The rejected Alonzo rides off to seek death in battle, clearing the way for Dinah’s “pounding” heart (my repetition of the image should give a sense of Philippson’s style), to once again become a sentimental symbol of religious feeling. Dinah’s virtue, faith, and constancy are a beacon to Jehuda Abravanel. The female subject is ascribed a decisive role in this historical vision, and it is a predictably passive one: as Jehuda and Isaac Abravanel embrace, Dinah kneels and prays. Ludwig Philippson’s own novels perpetuate this paradigm. His 1867 Jakob Tirado is a tale of secret Jews in sixteenth-century Portugal who flee the Inquisition to found the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Based on a blend of fact and legend gleaned from Kayserling’s histories of the Sephardim, the “Rebecca” plot returns to England: accompanying Jakob Tirado to Amsterdam is Maria Nunnez, a beautiful young conversa. Their ship is intercepted by the English navy, and the Portuguese Jews are taken prisoner. An English captain falls in love with Maria, and her reply is swift and flat: “Duke, I am a Jewess, I want to be one and must be one.” Maria Nunnez, Jakob Tirado, and the other Portuguese Jews are taken to England, where Queen Elizabeth is so impressed with Maria that she takes her for a ride in the royal carriage. The refugees are allowed to continue on to Amsterdam. Like Phöbus Philippson’s Dinah, Ludwig Philippson’s Maria ­Nunnez is paragon of passive virtue. Maria’s focalizing ears allow the reader to absorb Tirado’s moral lessons on Judaism and history. Philippson’s ­Tirado is a mouthpiece for an ideology of religious rationalism based

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on Sephardic models which nineteenth-century German Jewry strove to emulate. When they arrive in Amsterdam, Tirado shuns the Ashkenazi kabbalist Rabbi Uri of Emden, declaring “my spirit demands something else—clarity of thought!”52 The extent of Philippson’s mythologizing distortion of historical fact is noteworthy here.53 ­Kabbalah, of course, was as much a part of the Sephardic religious heritage as was Maimonides’ rationalism. Yet in their search for a usable past, GermanJewish modernizers such as Philippson constructed a “purified” image of Spanish Jewry that could inspire their struggle against (Hasid) mysticism and the folkways of traditional German Jews. The heroine of Philippson’s novel is a stand-in for an imagined female reading public which would uphold the new religious and family principles of the bourgeois age.

Politics and Religion: The Historical Novel as an Instrument of Apologetics and Reform Ismar Schorsch’s pioneering idea of the “myth of Sephardic supremacy” centers on how, in the early phase of their quest for emancipation, German Jewry identified with Sephardic religious rationalism as an enlightened religion that could also be a foundation for modernization and social integration—a “usable past.” It is important to note, however, that for German Jews, Spanish-Jewish history became a multivalent model, both positive and negative, with the “golden age” on the one hand signifying the ability of Jewish culture to flourish in the diaspora, and, on the other hand, the Inquisition embodying the antithesis of the ideal enlightened European state. The reinvention of Jewish culture for an age of hoped-for emancipation was accomplished through the creation of a new form of cultural memory, a bridge that would connect the nineteenth-century German present with the Sephardic past. In Chapter 2, I illustrated how Heine imagined such a link between German-Jewish and Spanish-Jewish history through the historically improbable figure of Rabbi Abraham, a German rabbi who studies in Toledo. Another such genealogy linking the Sephardic past with the German-Jewish present is established in Phöbus Philippson’s

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“­minority” historical novel. In Die Marannen, the focalizing family (Dinah and her father, Nissa) is revealed to be, like Heine’s Rabbi Abraham, originally German, drawn to Spain for its tradition of religious education. As Nissa explains to his daughter in the midst of the siege of Granada: Germany is my fatherland. My childhood was spent on the banks of the Rhine. There was danger there at every turn, for the common people were treated as the spoils of war in the nobles’ fights. As a youth I wandered to the Orient, the holy land of our forefathers was my destination. I wanted to pray at the ruins of the Temple, but there was no place to pray there, for Arab hordes chased away pilgrims, not even allowing them to shed tears for the misfortunes of their people. I returned to my fatherland. There I met your mother and you became the joy of our oppressed life. And the glory of our religious schools on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers shined westward into this blessed country. Here the thirst for knowledge could be satisfied, here one could engage unmolested and honorably with the word of the Lord. With wife and child, I took up my wanderer’s staff and left for Sepharad. Sixteen years have I been here.54

Philippson weaves together a narrative of Jewish history which posits German Jewry as the natural, rightful heir to the culture of religious learning which flourished in exile, first in Babylonia, then in medieval Spain. Passages such as these are indeed confirmation of Ismar Schorch’s thesis that German-Jewish Sephardism—in liturgical and educational reform, as well as in synagogue architecture and belles-lettres—was primarily an “internal” dynamic of religious modernization that strengthened Jewish identity through a new emphasis on historical traditions. Yet, in German-language historical novels (as well as public architecture), German-Jewish Sephardism could serve both “inner-directed” and “outer-directed” purposes. Hermann Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden (The Mysteries of the Jews; 1856–57), for example, explicitly addresses both an imagined Christian reader and an imagined Jewish reader. (It is my suggestion that all German-language Jewish novelists do so implicitly.) Reckendorf’s five-volume historical novel presents the drama of Jewish history in the form of fictional testaments, in which the generations of King David’s descendants (i.e., the Abravanel family) record their own stories against the backdrop of world history, from the

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destruction of the Second Temple to the era of Moses Mendelssohn. The novel concludes with an Afterword to the Reader: Here, my dear Jewish reader and coreligionist, you have a chapter of the history of your nation . . . here, my dear Christian reader and fellow man, you have the history of a people . . . from whose midst sprang the founder of your faith! Look at the errors of your fore­ fathers, how through misguided religious fervor they scorned and cast out the living witnesses of their faith and thus brought human sacrifices to the god of love! You have the opportunity to make good the injustices caused by your ancestors, for the descendants of these unfortunate victims live among you. Through friendship and fraternity with them you can erase the misdeeds of your forefathers.55

Reckendorf attempts to reach out beyond the minority sphere in order to admonish an imagined Christian reader for the many examples of persecution which are detailed in the novel: the Crusades, the Inquisition. We cannot know how his novel may have been received by such a reader; I have not been able to trace any reviews beyond those in Jewish newspapers. Yet Reckendorf assumes that his German-­ language novel will not be restricted to a minority public. The novel’s many footnotes not only detail Reckendorf’s extensive use of historical sources (including Josephus, the New Testament, the Talmud, and the histories of Rossi, Jost, and Graetz), but also clarify Hebrew terms such as schekel for the unfamiliar reader. He explains in an afterword to the novel that his Geheimnisse tale, inspired by Eugene Sue’s Les mystères de Paris, was so titled because it was his intention “to present the inner and religious life of my nation, its shadowy side as well as its radiant side, its struggles and failings, to a public that has a different faith.”56 Reckendorf not only admonishes the Christian reader, he also apologizes if he has “too nearly approached” the majority religion in his depiction of Jewish history. Reckendorf’s Schlußwort goes into more depth concerning its other stated purpose: to implore the Jewish reader not to abandon traditional beliefs in an age of religious reform: Did you ever think, as you enter a splendid temple built in a modern style and delight in the harmonious choral music and the lofty words of a masterful sermon, that your ancestors once made their way across

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dangerous paths to proclaim their faith in the god of their fathers in some damp and dingy space? Dear coreligionist! You are like the wanderer in a fable, wrapped in a sheltering cloak, which is the faith of your fathers, your faithful companion on your earthly pilgrimage. The storms of persecution and the sunshine of humanity compete with one another over which would first strip you of this cloak. I hope the latter shall not succeed in what the former could never do.57

The agenda of Reckendorf’s novel is clear. His Afterword alludes to the trappings of the new Reform Judaism (chorus, sermon, and a house of worship built in a modern style) which are seen as peripheral to his main concern: the retention of messianic faith against attempts by Jewish reformers to jettison prayers for a messianic future that would include the restoration of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and the rebuilding of the Temple.58 By writing Jewish history as the history of the Davidic line, Reckendorf’s historical novel retains a “latent” messianic subtext. But even the traditionalist German historical novel of the Jewish faith registers transformations in Judaism as historical thought is absorbed. Reckendorf finds a Sephardic pedigree for Haskalah as he casts Isaac Abravanel as its precursor in Die Geheimnisse der Juden: “My preferred course of study was the pure exegesis of the Holy Scriptures; I did not place a great value upon Talmudic interpretation. But I also pursued other disciplines with the greatest zeal, especially logic and mathematics.”59 The German-Jewish Enlightenment, with its openness to secular culture and its desire to reform Jewish religious education with an accent on Bible rather than Talmud,60 is now legitimized with an alleged Iberian precedent: Don Isaac Abravanel. Though novels such as Reckendorf ’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden may not have been read beyond the minority public sphere (the reception of Jewish minority culture in nineteenth-century Germany is discussed below), the nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novel imagined both Christian and Jewish readers as it sought to disseminate a popularized apologetic history. The dramatic core of Phöbus Philippson’s novella Die Marannen is contained in chapter 22. There, as Ismar Schorsch has observed,61 Isaac Abravanel’s plaidoyer before the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in Philippson’s novella anticipates the arguments for emancipation which German Jews put forth in their own day: “We are not strangers in a land foreign to us,

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we are sons of Spain. We were resident on this soil long before the time when your brave forefathers came from the north to settle in this glorious land.”62 Philippson’s Abravanel petitions for his people, who face expulsion from Spain in the wake of the reconquista of 1492. His tone is pleading as he defends the Jews against charges of “unproductivity” (recalling the ideology of emancipation in nineteenth-century Europe) and Abravanel falls to his knees as he declares the Jews’ readiness to serve their fatherland: “We have cultivated the sciences and arts which ennoble the human spirit. . . . The Spanish Jew, Your Highness, shuns the low trade of the usurer. Take my money, my possessions, my treasures, my houses! Equip ships to increase Spain’s fame and power. . . . Let us stay here, in the name of my nation I offer any sacrifice that our fatherland requires!”63 If, like Reckendorf ’s novel, Philippson’s novella assumes both non-Jewish and Jewish readers, the apologetic message of Abravanel’s speech to the Spanish monarchs is unmistakable. The historical symbolism of this scene expresses the hope that the self-appointed heirs to the Sephardic legacy make their patriotic declarations to more sympathetic ears. But the shadow of Torquemada hovers over this scene and its conclusion is all too well known. As German-Jewish minority culture attempts to turn the tragedies of Jewish history into inspirational slogans for the present-day concerns of emancipation and social integration, the undertones of those same symbols—forced baptism and persecution by the Inquisition—engrave ambivalence into cultural memory.

A Missed Dialogue? The Reception and Nonreception of German-Jewish Minority Culture in Literary History, Contemporary Reviews, and Memoirs Gershom Scholem’s verdict on the response to Jewish culture in nineteenth-century Germany remains the strongest rejection of the notion of a “German-Jewish symbiosis”: “The allegedly indestructible community of the German essence with the Jewish essence consisted, so long as these two essences really lived with each other, only of a chorus of Jewish voices and was, on the level of historical reality, never anything else than a fiction.”64 Did the German-Jewish historical novel,

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though it sought to address both Jewish minority readers and imagined non-Jewish readers, remain restricted to a minority sphere? Was the attempt to write minority history into national culture an illusory dialogue that Jews carried on with themselves? In assessing the impact of minority culture in nineteenth-century Germany, the literary historian faces large lacunae. Nationalist narratives of German literary history took little (if any) note of authors who wrote for a minority reading public, and subsequent accounts have continued the neglect. Whereas Brümmer’s Lexikon der deutschen Dichter des 19. Jahrhunderts contains entries on Lehmann and Philippson,65 and Julian Schmidt’s Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit (1886–96) praises Auerbach’s Spinoza and Heine’s Rabbi von Bacherach for their portraits of Jewish life,66 Rudolf Gottschall’s often revised and reprinted Die deutsche Nationalliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts omits any reference to Philippson, Lehmann, or Reckendorf (as do most other German literary histories) and is, in general, hostile to Jewish authors.67 The exception which confirms the rule is Heinrich Kurz’s Geschichte der neuesten deutschen Literatur von 1830 bis auf die Gegenwart.68 Kurz, a young German critic in exile in Switzerland, devotes some space to Ludwig Philippson, approvingly characterizing his literary project as a didactic instrument for Jewish modernization, which is opposed by both Christian and Jewish Dunkelmänner.69 Kurz’s presentation of Philippson demonstrates that the reception of Jewish minority culture by German liberals remained within the discourse of emancipation established at the end of the eighteenth century: an openness to a Jewish embrace of Bildung and civil improvement combined with a deep suspicion of Jewish collective identity and separatism as a “state within a state”—the rhetoric of the “Jewish Question.” Kurz amalgamates the historical genre favored by Philippson, the popular ghetto stories of Kompert, and the novels of Gustav Freytag, Fanny Lewald, and o ­ thers under the heading of “culturhistorische Romane,” which portray Jewish life, understanding the subtext of all these literary works as the struggle to replace a (negative) Jewish mentality which persists in a self-perception as a unique Volk or Nation with a confessional identity that could take part in the new democratic times.70 Kurz is one example of a willingness of German liberalism to engage with Jewish minority culture, for, in ad-

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dition to an even-handed account of Philippson’s aesthetic failures, he criticizes the use of untranslated Hebrew terms inaccessible to Christian readers. Yet Kurz’s sympathy for integrationist minority culture simultaneously participates in an ideology marked by exaggerated anxieties about the disruptive potential of minority particularity. As do the historical novels of Heine and Auerbach analyzed in the previous chapters, Kurz reads minority culture as a narrative of incomplete Enlightenment, but the non-Jewish liberal critic holds Jewish intolerance rather than anti-Semitism accountable for deferred social acceptance. Kurz’s cautious admission of the Jewish minority writer to German literary history is unique amid the general disregard. The self-perception of Jewish minority publishers would seem to confirm that the German-Jewish historical novel remained a subcultural phenomenon in nineteenth-century Germany. An announcement of a new edition of Philippson’s historical novels published by S. Schottlaender’s Schlesische Verlags-Anstalt Berlin (from approximately 1905) cites a positive evaluation from the Kieler Tageblatt (“Philippson’s works are warmly recommended to the entire German people, they are a true enrichment of our literature”), yet in his preface, the editor, I. Herzberg, laments “that Philippson’s works have still received too little attention” and that they have not been granted their place in German literary history.71 It would be wrong, however, to conclude from the omissions of literary history that Jewish minority culture went unnoticed in the ­nineteenth-century German public sphere. The novels of Lehmann, the Philippsons, and Eugen Rispart (the pen name of Rabbi I. A. Frankholm) were indeed reviewed in mainstream literary journals.72 The reception of German-Jewish historical novels and popular Jewish historiography in the larger German context sheds light on the self-perceptions of minority identity established in these texts. Liberal German nationalists often combined a “humanist” approach to the “Jewish Question” with a deep antipathy to what they perceived as Jewish particularism. Nineteenth-century literary criticism held up “objectivity” as the virtue of historical fiction, a model derived from Walter Scott’s narratives of a unified nation emerging from factionalist strife.73 Thus, Jewish minority culture was commended when it seemed to promote fictions of seamless national identity and condemned

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when the insistence on minority difference threatened to disrupt the myth of a homogenizing national culture. A sympathetic review of Rispart’s Die Juden und die Kreuzfahrer in England unter Richard Loewenherz (The Jews and the Crusaders in England Under Richard the Lion-Hearted; 1841), for example, sensitive to the drama of Jewish martyrdom (in the words of the reviewer, the misdeeds of “das mit dem Kreuz bezeichnete Gesindel [that rabble wearing the sign of the cross]”), praised narrative neutrality as it assigned literary quality: “It is likely that the author is himself one of the ‘old believers’ and, in that case, we should praise the balance with which his portraits shift back and forth between Jews and Christians. . . . We did not read this book without pleasure.”74 A review of Marcus Lehmann’s collected works, on the other hand, attacked what it perceived as Jewish chauvinism: [Ich müßte] wiederholt an die Geschichte von den drei Ringen aus Nathan dem Weisen denken, jedoch nicht weil dieselben [Erzälhungen] etwa in jenem toleranten Geiste geschrieben sind, den Lessing in seinem Nathan verkörpert hat. . . . [Sie sind eher] eine Verherrlichung des Judenthums, als dem einzig wahrem aller religiösen Bekenntnisse. . . . Tötet der Buchstabe den Geist, so hier die Tendenz die Poesie und Kunst.75 [I was often reminded of the story of the three rings from Nathan der Weise, but not because these stories were written in the same spirit of tolerance which Lessing embodied in his Nathan. . . . Instead, they are a glorification of Judaism as the sole valid religious belief. . . . If the letter kills the spirit, then here poetry and art are destroyed by bias.]

Drawing on the traditional Christian disparagement of Judaism as a religion of legalism, this 1872 review anticipates Heinrich von ­Treitschke’s attack on Heinrich Graetz’s history of the Jews which would launch the “Berlin anti-Semitism controversy” (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit) in 1879.76 A Jewish minority culture that did not show the proper deference toward the dominant religious and secular traditions in national culture would be accused of what Treitschke would call a “Geist der Überhebung” (uppity spirit). The criticism of Wissenschaft des Judentums and popular Jewish historical novels in the secular German press shows that the hostility to Jewish “particularism” evident in Gutzkow’s polemics of the 1830s remained in force throughout the nineteenth

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century, evidence that the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit was less a turning point than the culmination of an existing discourse.77 It is just as difficult to arrive at a clear assessment of the impact of minority culture on nineteenth-century German Jews. The relatively large subscription lists of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur contrast with the surprisingly few references to German-­Jewish minority literature which are to be found in other Jewish sources. If one scours the large and quite representative three-volume collection of German-Jewish memoirs edited by the historian Monika Richarz, not a single reference to the novels of Lehmann, the Philippsons, or Reckendorf is found amid the detailed recollections of reading habits.78 In attempting to assess the influence of German-Jewish minority culture, perhaps these memoirs have to be evaluated critically as a source: as recollections at specific points in life for specific purposes, which may have inclined the memoir writer to emphasize the embeddedness of German-Jewry in German culture, thus recalling childhood readings of Schiller’s poems, Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea, and Walter Scott’s novels rather than Marcus Lehmann’s Jüdische Volksbücherei and the feuilleton novels of the AZJ. Memoirs and scattered references in other works can, however, illustrate how the German-Jewish historical novel failed to capture the imagination of some leading German-Jewish intellectuals while inspiring others. Lion Feuchtwanger is most notable because his own future literary career as the great inheritor of the German-Jewish historical novel is already evident in his dissertation on Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1907). In a footnote, Feuchtwanger subtly suggests that his future works will be the antithesis of middling minority literature: “No writer has yet emerged who understands how to explore the feelings of medieval Jewry. The most which has been achieved in this area is artistically worthless literature for Jewish newspapers.”79 Feuchtwanger’s disparagement must be taken with a grain of salt; when Feuchtwanger reconstituted his library in exile in California in the 1940s and 1950s, he took pains to acquire works such as Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado. But if Feuchtwanger’s negative assessment of German-Jewish minority writing was a judgment based on literary quality, Victor Klemperer’s posthumously published autobiography describes alienation from the minority milieu from the vantage point of an assimilated Jew who sur-

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vived Nazi attempts at exclusion and ghettoization.80 Married to a nonJewish woman, Klemperer (1881–1960) was able to escape deportation. His autobiography must be read as the reaction of an uncompromising integrationist to an outside attempt to define him as a Jew: “When (Hitler) denied my Germanness, it let me recognize a deep and persistent basic element of my life in all of its clarity; it showed me that, alongside private and everyday things, there are things of general and typical importance.”81 The impulse for rethinking his life in the form of autobiography is declared to be a negative mimetic process. Against the attempt to exclude him, Klemperer now recasts his life, revealing all the paradoxes of turn-of-the-century assimilated German Jewry. What surprises the reader who knows Klemperer’s wartime journal LTI 82—where the author apologetically asserts that it was only the Nazis who drove him to consider “Jewish themes”—is how deeply Victor ­Klemperer was rooted in the German-Jewish milieu. His father was the rabbi in Landsberg an der Warthe.83 The German-Jewish literary critic Julius Bab was a childhood friend. Most of his other youthful associates were Jewish. Klemperer’s autobiography idealizes the time “before [the anti-Semite] Stoecker,” when he claims that the Jews of his circles hardly ran into any social obstacles.84 His early memories are of the books which his father received as part of the reading circle to which the town’s Bildungsbürger belonged. On the inside jacket of a volume of Freytag was a list of the club’s members. There, “Preacher Dr. Klemperer” (Jewish) was listed next to “Preacher Schroeter” (Protestant). Father and son shared a pride in being Reichsdeutsche and felt estranged from their relatives across the border in Bohemia. On the surface, it seems as if the family could not be more profoundly at home in its environment. Yet whereas classical and patriotic literature from his father’s reading circle nourished the young Klemperer’s mind, another youthful literary experience illustrates an early rejection of things Jewish. The young Gymnasium student Klemperer, up until this point inexperienced with the opposite sex, is part of a reading group with other students, including Ruth, a Jewish girl. She invites him to a private discussion of Berthold Auerbach’s historical novel Spinoza.85 Klemperer notes laconically, “there couldn’t be a more unerotic form of entertainment,”86 and the friendship remains nothing more than a “Kameradschaft des Sichbildens [a comradery of learning].” A novel by a popular

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­ ineteenth-century German-Jewish author who did not convert and n wrote on Jewish themes did not excite Klemperer’s imagination, nor does it serve for a catalyst for a romance with a Jewish woman. He does not explicitly reflect on the implications of the incident, to which he devotes three times as much attention as to the story of how he meets his non-Jewish wife. Klemperer’s autobiography points repeatedly to scenarios where the shared experience of literature shapes community. A mimetic acceptance of German imperial culture is privileged, whereas Klemperer does not relate any sense of a substantive Jewish culture that he can accept. Uncanny events and juxtapositions fill Klemperer’s Curriculum Vitae. On a trip to Paris, Klemperer is ill and needs a doctor. He follows a tip for the German traveler in Baedeker’s—and winds up in the office of the Zionist Max Nordau.87 On the same page that he assures himself of the unbridgeable division separating him from the Polish Jews he meets as a soldier in World War I, he abruptly notes his deep disappointment that the then-unknown Ernst Robert Curtius received a call to the university in Posnan that he had hoped for, hinting that antiSemitism may have hindered his career.88 Klemperer’s autobiography unconsciously seems to undermine the positive picture of assimilated German-Jewish life, which it attempts to convince itself of, by suggesting undercurrents that are left unexplored. Read against the grain, Klemperer’s memoirs suggest an unintended parallel with the GermanJewish historical novels of Auerbach and Heine: the tragedy of an incomplete Enlightenment, of the inability of the secularized intellectual to transcend the ghetto.

Minority Culture into National Culture: German-Jewish Novels in Hebrew and Yiddish Translation As a force for dissimilation, German-Jewish historical fiction pursued two aims that were often in tension with one another. On the one hand, addressed in German to both Jewish and non-Jewish readers, these narratives served an integrationist agenda, anchoring Jewish history in universalist moral worldviews and also often German political and cultural identifications. On the other hand, these fictionalized tales

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of noble Jewish thinkers and/or suffering Jewish believers were also preservationist, admonishing young Jews to identify positively with Judaism as a modern religion and to shun conversion to Christianity or radical secularization. Yet, in eastern Europe, in Hebrew and Yiddish translation, these German-Jewish novels had a very different valence. Although the ­German-language “Jewish public sphere” in the mid-nineteenth century stretched beyond Mitteleuropa to include eastern Europe (as mentioned above, the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur included many subscribers in Russia), in Hebrew and Yiddish translation, the works of writers like Philipson, Lehmann, and Reckendorf were transformed.89 The renaissance of Hebrew literature in the mid-nineteenth century was intimately connected with an awakening of Jewish national sentiment. A major milestone of this literary-political movement was the publication, in 1853, of Avraham Mapu’s historical novel Ahavat Zion. Mapu’s original work was pioneering and provocative, drawing upon the written language of the Bible to craft a spoken idiom for a romance novel with a historical setting. Yet while all nationist movements thrive upon the creative construction of usuable pasts that mobilize presentday emotions, no new original Hebrew historical novels were written between Mapu’s 1853 work and the pulication of the works of Kabak and Ibn Zahav in the 1920s. So, readers hungry for historical heroes satisfied themselves with tales that had first appeared in German in newspapers like Die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums or Der Israelit. Eastern European Jewish enlighteners (maskilim) such as Kalman Schulman, ­Shmuel Josef Fünn, and A. S. Friedberg (also known by his Hebraicized name, Har-Shalom) translated and adapted the works of German-Jewish authors for Hebrew readers. Whereas the Yiddish-language readership was many times greater than the public for Hebrew books, and there had existed older and more popular traditions of Yiddish-language historical fiction, Yiddish translations of German-Jewish novels were usually subsequent translations of a Hebrew translation. The historian Shmuel Feiner argues that these Hebrew and Yiddish adaptations of German-Jewish historical fiction popularized a maskilic conception of history: nurturing a sense of historical optimism and modern progress while also cultivating national sentiment through literary-psychological possibilities for identification.90 The literary

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critic Nitsa Ben-Ari sees these Hebrew and Yiddish translations of ­German-Jewish novels as important in the creation of a Jewish national literature. For Ben-Ari, the German-language novels of Philippson, Lehmann, and Reckendorf were repositories of subconscious “vague national longings,” which contrasted with the declared diasporism of all religious factions of nineteenth-century German Jewry, whether traditionalist or reformist.91 This repressed national consciousness, however, could emerge in Hebrew translation and form a core element of new Jewish culture. Indeed, the late nineteenth-century Hebrew translations of German-language novels were often adaptations, which altered details and even added new chapters for ideological impact. In A. S. Friedberg’s adaption of Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden, for example, the tale no longer concludes with the age of Moses Mendelssohn signaling a new era of progressive, Enlightened thought, but with the upheaval of the Napoleonic wars prompting a new generation to return to the Land of Israel. In Hebrew translation, minority narratives were refashioned into national narratives. The ambivalence of narrating Jewish history in the German language to a potentially mixed audience had been a project that sounded complex notes, renegotiating group identities in an age of mutable boundaries. The Hebrew translations stabilized and simplified the historical symbolism of the original German-language novels, offering figures of identification to Jewish readers in eastern Europe and beyond (for the Hebrew translations were then later translated into Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish), and also perhaps a sense that the trajectory of Jewish history might not find its apogee in a fusion of European and Jewish ideals, but in their uncoupling.

Between Minority Culture, German Patriotism, and Zionism: Developments in the Later Nineteenth Century In 1874, the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur closed its operations after twenty-three years. In an article in the AZJ,92 ­Ludwig Philippson explained that the number of subscribers (though still substantial) had dropped off since 1866; most prominent was the loss of subscribers in the Habsburg empire (due to the political situation). The

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second reason that Philippson cited for the institute’s demise was a lack of new quality manuscripts that fit its moral-educational agenda of edifying popular history or historical fiction. Philippson’s pronouncement should not, however, be taken as a sign that German-Jewish minority culture experienced a lull in the later nineteenth century. It is true that, compared with the rapid growth of Jewish publishing from the 1830s through the 1860s, and the attendant flowering of German-Jewish writing, few noteworthy German-Jewish historical novelists emerged in imperial Germany. It is also true that, in the later nineteenth century, the hold of the “Sephardic mystique” on German-Jewish historical interest lessened. Nonetheless, the years 1871 through 1918 reveal significant continuities in German-Jewish cultural memory, as well as important new departures. The German-Jewish fascination with Sephardic themes was, of course, never a single-minded focus. By the 1880s, German Jews were clearly past any uneasiness about their own Ashkenazic heritage which they might have felt in the early years of Wissenschaft des Judentums. In 1886, Ludwig Geiger founded the Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, an academic journal devoted to the history of Jews in Germany. In the same year, Moritz Oppenheim’s paintings of traditional Jewish life (Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben), Romantic images of German-Jewish religious customs and costumes of the previous century, were reproduced in a popular book which would go through multiple editions. The subject of perhaps the most important German-Jewish historical novel from this era is also evidence of a new appreciation of the German-Jewish past: Georg Hermann’s Jettchen Gebert (1906), which concerns a Jewish family in Berlin in the Biedermeier era. Scholars have also noted that the fashion for Moorish-style architecture in synagogue construction declined in these years, as many ­German-Jewish communities opted for more muted styles.93 But although some have interpreted this as a defensive response to the resurgence of anti-Semitism in imperial Germany, it is important to recognize that the Moorish style did not disappear in the late nineteenth century.94 Even at a time when prominent public anti-Semites such as Heinrich von Treitschke and Paul de Lagarde attacked Jews as unwelcome “Orientals” and singled out synagogue architecture as

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a odious reminder of their “alien nature,” new synagogues in a style which recalled Muslim Spain were built in Nuremberg (1874), Kaiserslauten (1886), Wolfenbüttel (1893), and Hamburg (1895).95 Marcus Lehmann’s own congregation in Mainz opted for the Moorish style for their new building in 1878 (Figure 8). Analogously, despite a shift away from the visible dominance of Sephardism (and its dissemination through historical novels), there is a great degree of continuity in popular forms of G ­ erman-Jewish historical memory in the later nineteenth century. Lehmann’s Jüdische Volksbücherei series continued to appear in print long after his death in 1890, reissuing his own novels and stories from Der Israelit (such as Die Familie y Aguilar in 1892 and Eine ­Sedernacht in Madrid in 1894), as well as works by other Orthodox writers.96 A new edition of Ludwig Philippson’s literary works appeared in 1891–92.97 Moreover, these works could enjoy an even greater circulation through the new network of Jewish lending libraries and literary societies which sprouted across the German-speaking lands in the 1880s and 1890s.98 The yearly activities of one such Jewish literary society in Berlin illustrates the range of their interests: a series of lectures on G ­ erman-Jewish

Figure 8. The Moorish-style synagogue where the neo-Orthodox rabbi and writer Marcus Lehmann preached. Image courtesy of Stadtarchiv Mainz BPSF/1152A.

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literature, on Leopold Zunz, on Isaac Abravanel, Spinoza, and Uriel Acosta, and on the history of Jews in Berlin.99 As German-Jewish selfunderstanding and communal identity evolved, Sephardism retained a prominent role as a historical model, symbol, and object of fascination. New journals such as the Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, which began publication in 1898, chronicle an active minority culture based on a popularization of a Jewish historical consciousness (Wissenschaft des Judentums). In the pages of the Jahrbuch, historical novellas appeared alongside discussions of Hebrew literature and ­German-Jewish history. New literary histories, such as Gustav K ­ arpeles’s Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (1886), presented the historical novels of Philippson, Lehmann, Heine, and Auer­bach as the contemporary capstone to thousands of years of Jewish writing.100 In 1892, German Jews took advantage of the four hundredth anniversary year of the Spanish expulsion to reexamine their own place in history. Not surprisingly, diverging views of the Sephardic legacy reflected growing divisions between integrationists, who emphasized German patriotism and praised the cultural and religious richness of diaspora Judaism, and Jewish nationalists, whose identities were marked by the new eruptions of anti-Jewish sentiment in western and eastern Europe. In Berlin, the Reform rabbi Moritz Levin (1843–1914) reflected upon the quatercentennial of Ferdinand and Isabella’s expulsion edict when he reissued Iberia, his 1885 collection of poems on Sephardic themes.101 In a new preface, Levin looked back on 1492 less as a tragic “exile within an exile” than as the beginning of a new era of human progress in which diaspora Jews, like Christopher Columbus, “discovered a new world of freedom, equality, and brotherhood.”102 Levin noted with approval that a small number of Jews have once again settled on Spanish soil. By contrast, in Jassy (Romania), Karpel Lippe (1830–1915), a rabbi who was active in the Hibbat Zion (“Love of Zion”) movement in the 1880s, mourned Spanish Jewry’s catastrophe as traditional Jews do, linking it with the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.103 A few years later, in 1897, Lippe delivered the opening speech at the First Zionist Congress in Basel. The rise of political Zionism would both rejuvenate and transform the new forms of Jewish cultural memory which had taken shape in nineteenth-century Germany.104 On the

Jewish Historical Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Germany

one hand, the Zionist critique of Jewish assimilation in western Europe led to an altered perception of the meaning of the Spanish-Jewish past. For German-Jewish integrationists, Sephardic Jewry symbolized openness to Western thought and participation in secular society. One liberal historian described Isaac Abravanel as “a Spanish-Jewish Wilhelm von Humboldt.”105 But for young German-Jewish Zionists, the fact that many Sephardic Jews still retained Spanish as their mother tongue four hundred years after the expulsion of 1492 was an argument that even thorough acculturation would not hinder anti-Semitism, a portent for German-Jewish assimilationists.106 Influenced by Theodor Herzl, a new generation of German-Jewish writers drew upon nineteenth-century traditions of German-Jewish historical fiction to give expression to the political moment. A historical drama rather than a historical novel, Alfred Nossig’s 1906 play Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes (Abarbanel: The Drama of a ­People) infuses German-Jewish Sephardism with the ethos of Herzlian Zionism. Nossig (1864–1943), born in Poland, was a sculptor, librettist, and Zionist activist in Berlin, who wrote for the Jüdische ­Rundschau.107 The play is set in Granada in 1492, but the scene is more reminiscent of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in Paris. Christian generals and government ministers celebrate their victory over the Muslims, but their talk soon turns to the “internal enemy,” the Jews: “Spain was Spanish,” exclaims one, “today it belongs to the Jews!”108 The enemies of Don Isaac Abravanel, resentful that a Jew holds a powerful position at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, accuse him of passing secret messages to the Jewish doctor of the Moorish king during the siege of Granada. Abravanel is eventually rehabilitated, but King Ferdinand concludes that it was a mistake to allow Jews to occupy high-profile posts. The affair transforms Abravanel into a proto-Zionist. In contrast to Philippson’s Die Marannen, the dramatic conflict in Nossig’s play does not revolve around an articulate speech that should convince Spanish Catholics to accept Jews as their fellow countrymen. Instead, Nossig focuses on the ensuing conflict in the Jewish community. In Nossig’s play, Abravanel’s warnings against the delusion that the Jews will ever be accepted in Christian Spain and his dream of an immediate return to Zion earn him the disdain of both “liberal” and “orthodox” Jews. But Nossig’s Abravanel succeeds in winning the hearts and

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minds of the Jewish youth, and the catastrophic expulsion of 1492 is transformed into a triumphant exodus. Alfred Nossig’s Zionist interpretation of Abravanel drama draws on the noble, heroic qualities in Heinrich Heine’s “Don Isaak” figure. Nossig’s Abravanel has “the upright, proud posture of the Spanish nobility; only his black beard which ends in two points gives him a Jewish appearance.”109 Heinrich Heine never completed his Jewish historical novel, and Der Rabbi von Bacherach remained a fragment. Whereas in Phöbus Philippson’s Abravanel-novella, the bastion of faith Don Isaac is united with the modern aesthete Jehuda (a metaphor for a dissimilating minority literature which seeks to blend secular culture with religious tradition), throughout his life Heine preserved this opposition as an irreconcilable contradiction. Both Heine and Philippson employ the Sephardic Jewish past to signify the precarious place of the Jew seeking admission to European society, and both suggest Sephardic Jewry as a symbol or even a historical prototype for modernizing Jews in nineteenth-century European society. But Nossig’s play changes the terms of “dissimilation.” Spanish-Jewish history no longer supplies images for the ambivalence of integration in a context where secularization, religious reform, openness to secular culture, and persistent religious (and racial) prejudice challenge Jewish identities. Instead, Nossig uses the vocabulary of German-Jewish minority culture (i.e., Sephardism) to attack its integrationist foundations. If one accepts that, on one level, both Heine’s 1840 fragment and Nossig’s 1906 play are literary responses to anti-Semitism, Nossig leaves no room for ambivalence concerning his pessimistic outlook for the future of Jews in Europe.

Fou r  German Modernism and Jewish Memory Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (1921)

Modernism, with its emphasis on fragmentation, rupture, nonlinearity, and formal experimentation, seems worlds apart from the writing strategies of nineteenth-century historicism and nineteenth-century historical fiction. Modernist historical fiction, by contrast, is defined by the attempt to narrate these very discontinuities.1 Yet modernism is often seen in tension with historical specificity. Kafka’s works, for example, with their haunting images of bureaucracy and technology, seem on one level to connote unequivocally “modern society,” or even “the fate of Jews in the twentieth century,” yet Kafka’s published works never mention years or even the word “Jew.” Even when they are available (which is rare), geographic locations in Kafka are hazy. By contrast, Else Lasker-Schüler, in her Hebräische Balladen (Hebrew ­Ballads; 1913), represents a very different sort of Jewish literary modernism, with rhapsodic references to biblical figures. But, at first glance, Lasker-Schüler appears to be even less likely an heiress than Kafka to nineteenth-century traditions of Jewish self-understanding expressed through historical narrative. The modernist poetry and drama for which Lasker-Schüler is best known has commonly been designated with the half-praising attributes of “idiosyncratic” and “playful” or “private” language experiments. Lasker-Schüler’s short prose piece Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (The Wonder-Working Rabbi of Barcelona; 1921) is one her least known and most impenetrable works. But this work is significant as a modernist rewriting of Heine and as a transformation of the minority traditions of literature and cultural memory represented by Ludwig Philippson.

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Lasker-Schüler’s title is, of course, an obvious allusion to Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach.2 As we will see, Lasker-Schüler’s terse modernist fantasy is legible against the background of nineteenth-century German-Jewish novelists, and it offers an alternative understanding of memory and “minor” writing compared to that which is found in Kafka. Lasker-Schüler’s text illustrates the continuity of historical fiction as a vehicle for German-Jewish cultural memory throughout the Weimar period, at the same time that her modernist innovations transform the idea of “dissimilation” and minority culture. Furthermore, Lasker-Schüler’s visual-material presentation of her Jewish historical fiction is of a piece with a new aesthetics of German-Jewish culture around 1920.

Heine in the Weimar Republic: Modernism and Visual Culture The reprints of Lehmann’s and Philippson’s novels from the 1890s to the 1920s made them a kind of new tradition, as they established a continuity of Jewish minority historical memory. The apotheosis of Heine as one of the giants of German literature (and his belated acceptance by German-Jewish literary critics as a Jewish writer rather than a renegade,3 something that was easier after Heine was long dead and Wilhelmine cultural politics safely established) assured that his Der Rabbi von Bacherach remained a central text for German Jews. On the one hand, the continuing influence of Heine was evidenced in scholarly studies. Both Gustav Karpeles (1895)and Lion Feuchtwanger (1907) explored the origins and meanings of Heine’s unfinished novel while mentioning parallels with the work of Berthold Auerbach, Philippson, and Lehmann.4 Another example of the interest in Der Rabbi von Bacherach and the figure of Don Isaac Abravanel was the (perhaps presumptuous) effort by Max Viola, in 1913, to complete Heine’s novel.5 Viola, who had previously authored two novels that were serialized in the Zionist newspaper Die Welt, develops Heine’s tale as one about German Jews caught between reactionary Catholics and a network of Sephardic court doctors and progressive Protestants who persuade Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I to intervene on behalf of the Jews.

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona

Viola’s novel is thus an extension of the Kulturkampf-era overtones of German-Jewish Sephardism. Another innovation of Viola’s book is a more vivid description of the murder and plunder of the Jews of ­Bacherach, which mark his novel as one written with a consciousness of the pogroms and renewed ritual murder accusations in eastern Europe that jolted the entire Jewish world between 1881 and 1911. A third aspect of the continuing renewal of Heine’s novel as a source for German-Jewish cultural memory was the proliferation of illustrated editions of Der Rabbi von Bacherach that used visual culture to reinterpret Heine’s text. A number of bibliophile editions with innovative illustrations were produced from 1913 to 1923. The first of these, illustrated by Kurt Tuch, was reviewed together with Viola’s “improvement” of Heine by Ludwig Geiger in the ­Allgemeine ­Zeitung des Judentums; Geiger declared Viola’s work to be inimical to Heine’s spirit while he commended the illustrated volume to ­readers “with modern sensibilities.”6 Tuch’s illustrations are generally in a colorful art nouveau style, with round natural lines drawing out eroticism and ennui in equal measure in the contrasting female figures (Figure 9).7 The dark figure of Rabbi Abraham brings a sobering countertheme into play, alluding to the threat of anti-Jewish violence that haunts even the comic-satiric aspects of Heine’s text. In the wake of World War I, illustrated versions of Der Rabbi von ­Bacherach would intensify these haunting, dark, and violent dimensions, using the new techniques of the avant-garde. Josef Budko’s illustrations from 1921 (Figures 10 and 11) use an Expressionist woodcut style to depict violence, agony, and religious longing.8 In Max Lieberman’s 1923 illustrations (Figures 12 and 13), a realist sketchbook style that recalls Hermann Struck’s illustrations to Arnold Zweig’s Das ostjüdische ­Antlitz (The Face of East European Jewry; 1920) populates Heine’s world with the sort of religious Jews from contemporary eastern ­Europe who transformed the German-speaking central European Jews who met them as refugees during World War I. All of the themes which emerge in visual reinterpretations of Heine around 1920 (cultural Zionism; the religious world of eastern European Jewry; the aesthetics of the avant-garde) are also operative in Lasker-Schüler’s modernist historical tale.

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Figure 9. Kurt Tuch, illustration to Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Morawe and Scheffelt, 1913). Rabbi Abraham leads the seder. Courtesy of the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection, Special Collections Research Center, The George Washington University.

Figure 10. Josef Budko, illustration to Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Euphorion, 1921). Rabbi Abraham and Beautiful Sara. Courtesy of the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection, Special Collections Research Center, The George Washington University.

Figure 11. Josef Budko, illustration to Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Euphorion, 1921). Budko’s final illustration imagines a haunting vision of Rabbi Abraham burned in an auto-da-fé in connection with Heine’s dubious excuse for the fragmentary state of the tale: that the concluding chapters were lost in a fire. Courtesy of the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection, Special Collections Research Center, The George Washington University.

Figure 12. Max Lieberman, illustration to Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Propyläen, 1923). Jews dressed like the eastern European immigrants in the 1920s illustrate a novel set in fifteenth-century Frankfurt am Main. Courtesy of the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection, Special Collections Research Center, The George Washington University.

Figure 13. Max Lieberman, illustration to Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Propyläen, 1923). Don Isaak Abarbanel in the Frankfurt ghetto. Courtesy of the I. Edward Ki˝ev Judaica Collection, Special Collections Research Center, The George Washington University.

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona

Memory Come Alive: Kafka and Lasker-Schüler Franz Kafka did not have much regard for Else Lasker-Schüler. In 1913 he wrote to Felice Bauer, “I cannot bear her poems; their emptiness makes me feel nothing but boredom, and their contrived verbosity nothing but antipathy. Her prose I find just as tiresome for the same reasons; it is the work of an indiscriminate brain twitching in the head of an overwrought city-dweller.”9 Literary critics have also polarized the two writers, understanding their styles as antithetical examples of German-Jewish modernism. Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature,” derived from Kafka’s prose, letters, and diaries, sets itself against a mode of writing characteristic of LaskerSchüler and the Prague authors Gustav Meyrink and Max Brod, against their rhapsodic appropriation of historical and religious imagery for an expressionism emblematic of the early twentieth-century Jewish cultural revival in western Europe.10 For Deleuze and Guattari, this “artificially enrich[ed] . . . German . . . swell[ed] . . . up through all the resources of symbolism, of oneirism, of esoteric sense, of a hidden signifier . . . implies a desperate attempt at symbolic reterritorialization, based in archetypes, kabbalah, and alchemy, that accentuates its break from the people and will find its political result only in Zionism and such things as the ‘dream of Zion.’”11 Deleuze’s and Guattari’s notion of “minor literature” is the very opposite of a language where meaning can be secured in symbols. “Minor literature” is not, in their view, concomitant with a political, religious, or existential need to be rooted in the land. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari propose, a “minor literature” goes “always farther in the direction of deterritorialization,” linking every individual enunciation to a politics of the collective, a literature of writers seeking “to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language.”12 In spite of what the preceding comments might suggest, it is not at all ill-starred to argue that a theory of “minor literature” based on Kafka can be productively applied to a text by Else Lasker-Schüler. A close reading of Lasker-Schüler’s short narrative Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona demonstrates that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s strict exclusion of Judaizing symbolism from their aesthetics of emancipatory modernism is untenable.13 In the previous chapter, I posited

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that D ­ eleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” is largely inappropriate for an analysis of a nineteenth-century German-Jewish minority culture, in which historical fictions fashioned stable new identities for a Jewish minority in an era of embourgoisement. This chapter reads Lasker-Schüler’s modernist tale (which, despite its brevity, contains all of the elements of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novel) as a profound revision of that tradition. Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona subverts the Enlightenment ideology inherent in the historical novels of Berthold Auerbach, Heinrich Heine, and Ludwig Philippson, while accentuating their ambivalence about an unfulfilled Enlightenment promise of reconciliation between Jewish history and European culture. Uniquely legible against the background of nineteenth-century bourgeois German-Jewish culture, Lasker-Schüler’s novel is what one might term (using Deleuze’s and Guattari’s vocabulary) an “unsettling” reterritorialization, because her traditionalizing story of oppressed Spanish Jewry in search of safety and renewal in Palestine gives no easy affirmative answers to disturbing questions about a livable space for the Jew within the German novel, as well as about the redemptive potential of a new national culture rooted in a homeland that is merely terrestrial. In the following, I will show how Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunder­ rabbiner von Barcelona illustrates the antinomies of a “deterritorialized” literature. A close analysis of this modernist text forces us to rethink Deleuze’s and Guattari’s aesthetic categories. Through its use of the very symbolist strategies that Deleuze and Guattari exclude from their understanding of “minor literature,” Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona corresponds well to their notion of “deterritorialization,” which is as much an aspect of language as it is an antinationalist political program. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s neat opposition of a radical avant-garde aesthetics to a (politically and aesthetically) retrograde symbolism is insupportable: Lasker-Schüler’s symbols demonstrate the ongoing vibrancy of a literary strategy employed by modernists since Baudelaire. The chapter is divided into four sections. The first part analyzes Lasker-Schüler’s Spanish imagery against the background of German Jewry’s evolving image of itself in relation to Sephardic and eastern European Jews. The second section discusses the politics of LaskerSchüler’s tale with reference to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona

“deterritorialization” and their claims regarding symbolism and Zionism. The third segment approaches “deterritorialization” as a feature of modernist language, evaluating Lasker-Schüler’s relation to Yiddish, Hebrew, and German-Jewish modernism. The last portion reads Lasker-Schüler’s tale as a revision of nineteenth-century German-­Jewish historical novels which selected images from Jewish history to fit an integrationist agenda and to fashion gender roles for a bourgeois age.

Barcelona Between Bacherach, Bratslav, and Berlin: From “Sephardic Supremacy” to the “Discovery” of the Eastern Jews First published in 1921 by Paul Cassirer as a separate volume, Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona points at once to the Spanish-Jewish legacy, the nineteenth-century German-Jewish past, and to Lasker-Schüler’s present in Weimar Germany. Critics have noted that the alliteration of “Barcelona” and “Bacherach” is unquestionably evocative of Heine’s unfinished historical novel Der Rabbi von Bacherach.14 Lasker-­Schüler’s opening sentence conjures up an image of Jewish history familiar to readers of Heine’s historical romance, a dialectic of persecution and spiritual resistance: “Die Bevölkerung von Barcelona befleißigte sich in den Wochen, die Eleasar in Alt-Asien in frommen Betrachtungen verlebte, die Juden zu verfolgen” (9, 19–21/494) [“During the weeks that Eleazar spent in pious contemplation in old Asia, the people of Barcelona took pains to persecute the Jews” (225)]. In contrast to H ­ eine’s fragment, where Rabbi Abraham and Beautiful Sara’s flight from the slaughter of the Jews of Bacherach leads to a series of strangely comic encounters in the Frankfurt ghetto, the narrative trajectory of Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona moves toward a bifurcated endpoint of massacre and escape. In response to the anti-Jewish fervor, the Jews of Barcelona appeal to their leader, Eleazar the “miracle rabbi,” with a renewed desire to settle in the land of Israel. The question of a return to Palestine leads to tension between segments of Barcelona’s Jewish society and their leader, as well as with the gentiles. Meanwhile, Amram, daughter of a prominent Jewish builder and (like Lasker-Schüler) a poetess, falls in love with Pablo, son of Barcelona’s Christian mayor. Their affair inflames the Christian mob, which begins

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to rampage when the miracle rabbi snubs a delegation sent to dissuade him from leading an exodus from the city. Both Amram’s father and Eleazar perish in the ensuing anarchy, as she and Pablo apparently flee by ship with some of Barcelona’s Jews. Though the tone is fablelike (suggesting “timelessness”), Lasker-Schüler’s story is marked by specific historical inferences, for there had been no Jewish community in Spain to speak of since the expulsion of 1492. Lasker-Schüler’s story of a rabbi’s relation to his persecuted community has much in common with Heine’s narrative. Both turn to history as a literary response to contemporary anti-Semitism. Just as Heine’s fragment was indirectly inspired by the experience of the H ­ ep-Hep riots of 1819 and the Damascus blood libel of 1840, the modern antiSemitism sweeping Germany in the years following World War  I is echoed in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona as Lasker-­Schüler’s narrator gives the reader the perspective of the anti-Jewish crowd: “Sie waren es wieder, die den Handel mit übermäßigen Preisen den spanischen Kaufleuten erschwerten, zu gleicher Zeit aber mit ihrem Erlöserehrgeiz sich breit machten in den unteren armen Schichten der Stadt” (9, 21–24/494) [“It was they, once again, who made it hard for Spanish merchants to charge excessive prices, but, at the same time, spread their redemptive ambitions (Erlöserehrgeiz) among the poor of the city” (225)]. Though set in a mythic, yet clearly pre-1492 Spain, Lasker-Schüler’s tale tells of anti-Semitism provoked not by Crusader zeal or blood libel, but rather through a modern reactionary ideology which attacks an ethnic minority as paradoxically both capitalist “­exploiters” and leftist “subversives.” Critic Jacob Hessing rightly notes that Lasker-Schüler’s neologism Erlöserehrgeiz can be read as a reference to the revolutionary upheaval sweeping Germany in 1918–19 and to the utopian socialism of Kurt Eisner, Rosa Luxemburg, and especially Gustav Landauer, with whom Lasker-Schüler became acquainted through the countercultural Neue Gemeinschaft.15 Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona thus becomes an overdetermined site of memory as the tradition of the German-Jewish historical novel inaugurated by Heine is revived to confront the chaotic first years of the Weimar Republic. Whereas the nineteenth-century novels of Heine, Philippson, Hermann Reckendorf, and Marcus Lehmann evoked the anti-Jewish persecutions of the medieval past in order to establish

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona

historical contrasts that would place hope in an enlightened future, Lasker-Schüler’s reimagining of the Jewish historical novel collapses medieval Spain and modern Germany. Lasker-Schüler’s anti-historicist impulse merges literary modernism with a traditional Jewish notion of history. The anachronistic attribution of economic and political pretexts to anti-Jewish persecutions is part of an aesthetic which alludes to nineteenth-century historical realism as it dissociates from it. In Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, dates and details of geography are fantastic—Barcelona’s Jews celebrate the miracle rabbi’s birthday in the nonexistent month of “Gâm,” for instance. The reader’s inability to fix the narrated events in realistic space and time normalizes modern anti-Semitism to a historical archetype. Lasker-Schüler’s language amalgamates contemporary experience of the anti-Semitism of the proto-Nazi Freikorps (evoked in the fusion of anti-Semitism and antileftist politics) and the eastern European mob (evoked in the ahistorical use of the term pogrom [14/229, 501]) with the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion of 1492 and the Osterfest (translated by Robertson as “feast of Passover”) (15/230, 502) persecutions of the German Middle Ages which form the background to Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach. As the historian Yosef H. Yerushalmi has argued, normative history is the dominant mode of Jewish collective memory, in sharp contrast to the counterintuitive modern historical thought which remained restricted to an intellectual elite with the rise of Wissenschaft des Judentums in the early nineteenth century.16 By referring to Heine, Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona inscribes itself within the tradition of the nineteenth-century Jewish historical novel, a modern genre which arose from the same milieu as the modern historical thought of Leopold Zunz and the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. But where the nineteenth-century historical novelist painted realist historical canvases which would redefine cultural memory for an age that had broken with tradition, Lasker-Schüler’s modernist prose calls into question the very notions of historical progress that allowed a liberal writer like Ludwig Philippson to see tradition as a continuous evolution and a radical such as Heine to see the modern Jewish condition as beyond tradition (albeit in constant struggle with it). In contrast to Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach, where descriptive passages reminis-

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cent of Walter Scott animate a portrait of a medieval past within the context of a linear narrative, Lasker-Schüler’s prose recoups a mythic mode of historical experience for nontraditional ends. In Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, references to specific historical forces and situations are at once made and effaced to give a vision of Jewish history bounded neither by traditional eschatology nor by modern ideas of unlimited advancement, but instead by the twin abysses of apocalypse and false redemption. Lasker-Schüler’s text draws on the resources of a modern form of Jewish cultural memory, the historical novel, in order to undermine a basic feature of that form’s historicist method and Enlightenment teleology: the insistence on a true difference between “then” and “now” which is confident of a better world in an enlightened “when.” This rejection of Enlightenment historical optimism emerges from the story’s final image. In the midst of the massacre perpetrated against the Jews of Barcelona, Lasker-Schüler’s miracle rabbi takes revenge, smashing his hilltop palace and raining death on the Christians below: “(Er) erlosch ihre Erleuchtung, zermalmte ihre Körper” (17/504) [“(He) extinguished their enlightenment, crushed their bodies” (232)]. As the light is extinguished on Lasker-Schüler’s imaginary historical canvas, it is clear that her vision is much bleaker than the forwardlooking fictions of Auerbach, Heine, and Ludwig Philippson. Berthold Auerbach had imagined Spinoza as a secular messiah who could overcome the Jewish degradation epitomized by the figure of the Wandering Jew. In Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado (1867), a ship of conversos successfully flees the Inquisition to reach an Amsterdam which radiates the libertarian promise of Goethe’s Egmont. Heine’s narrative breaks off in the Frankfurt ghetto in 1489, leaving the historically attuned reader with ambivalent associations: the coming catastrophe of 1492 is offset by the hope that the emancipation which opened those very ghetto walls shortly before Heine’s birth would be completed. By contrast, the Jews of Lasker-Schüler’s Barcelona seek refuge, not in an image of a new, tolerant northern European state that evokes the society into which German Jews desired to integrate, but in a return to “old Asia [Alt-Asien]” (9/494) that inverts the nineteenth-century (Hegelian) model of “progress in history.” Lasker-Schüler’s Europe is a ruined landscape of slaughter which is at once historically specific

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona

and defamiliarized. The estrangement of historical time and space in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona undermines any notion that Enlightenment hopes can be rooted in a European future. The Spanish setting of Lasker-Schüler’s tale is further evidence of her simultaneous evocation and revision of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novel. Like Auerbach’s Spinoza or the eponymous Rabbi Abraham in Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach—a German who studied in Toledo, where he acquired a “free-spirited mode of thinking, like the Spanish Jews who at that time reached an extraordinary level of Bildung”17—Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona seems to posit a Sephardic model for modernizing German Jews to emulate. Could Lasker-Schüler also have known the “minority” novels with Sephardic themes, such as Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado? There is no direct evidence of this. Yet this German-language literature was so widespread that an acculturated Jewish family such as Lasker-Schüler’s might easily have had access to it through community libraries or teachers. An 1867 subscription list of the Institut zur ­Förderung der israelitischen Literatur shows that Edelstein, a teacher in Lasker-Schüler’s hometown of Elberfeld (with a Jewish population of 2,340 in 1925) ordered three copies of all of the book society’s publications. More important than the question of whether Lasker-Schüler intended to “rewrite” Philippson’s Jakob Tirado is the issue of how her text alludes to the conventions of nineteenth-century German-Jewish minority culture, not least its idealization of Sephardic Jewry’s heritage of religious rationalism and cultural achievement as a “usable past” for German Jews who sought to integrate themselves into modern European culture. This image of Spanish Jewry was disseminated above all through popular historical fiction, through the works of well-known writers such Auerbach and Heine as well as through novels aimed at the Jewish minority public (especially youth) in nineteenth-century Germany. The stories about Sephardic Jews which were serialized in such newspapers as the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and later appeared in book form reveal much about German Jewry’s self-understanding in the nineteenth century. Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado is representative (and shows important parallels with Lasker-Schüler’s story, which will be explored below). In Philippson’s novel, a group of secret

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Jews led by Tirado, a poet, flee Portugal by ship. The romance of a young Jewish woman with a non-Jew forms a subplot. Philippson’s tale of the Portuguese Jews’ noble perseverance in the face of the dark forces of the Inquisition is, to be sure, a sentimental appeal both for young Jews to hold on to their faith in an age of assimilation and for religious tolerance from an enlightened European society that would see reactionary Spain as its antithesis. Yet more than this, Jakob Tirado is also a plaidoyer for German Jews to see their spiritual antecedents in the Sephardim. When Philippson’s eponymous hero escapes to Amsterdam, he shuns the Ashkenazic Rabbi Uri of Emden, known as a kabbalist, proclaiming that “my spirit demands something else . . . clarity of thought.”18 The pedagogical agenda of such novelistic scenes is clear. German Jews were to see in the historical novel about heroic Sephardim an allegory of their own quest to elevate those aspects of Jewish culture which harmonized with social integration in the age of Enlightenment (and as historical legitimation for such a quest). If Else Lasker-Schüler could on occasion declare that she herself was the granddaughter of a noble Sephardic Jew, a claim which critic Dieter Bänsch has dismissed as a myth,19 it is because wide segments of the German Jewish community were also eager to claim the Spanish-­ Jewish mantle as part of their own spiritual lineage.20 Yet whereas Lasker-Schüler’s tale of “the hard-pressed Jewish nobility [die bedrängten Edeljuden]” (10, 28/495) in Spain and their resistance to religious oppression unmistakably harkens back to the nineteenth-century novels which promoted an identification with “superior” Sephardim, the title of her story turns this tradition on its head. Barcelona’s Eleazar is called a Wunderrabbiner, a hardly sympathetic German-Jewish designation for the Hasidic “rebbes” of eastern Europe. For those Jews in western and eastern Europe who considered themselves heirs to both Maimonides’ rationalist faith and the European Enlightenment, there was scarcely an image more hateful than that of the Hasidic “miracle rabbi,” in their eyes a religious charlatan who encouraged and exploited popular superstitions. In his influential Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden, for example, the Breslau historian Heinrich Graetz railed against Hasidic “irrationalism” and “obscurantism” which, to his great dismay, flourished even as Moses Mendelssohn ushered in a new age of religious Enlightenment.21 In

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the popular imagination, the bearded followers of “miracle rabbis” in their “Oriental” dress symbolized everything that Jewish modernizers fought against. But the image of the Hasidim in the German-Jewish mind began to be challenged at the turn of the century. With Martin Buber’s publication of Die Geschichten des Rabbi Nachman (Tales of Rabbi Nachman) in 1906, a generation of young Jews in the West discovered a new sense of identity in his stylized German-language presentation of the writings of the charismatic zaddik of Bratslav. To those disillusioned with the culture created by previous generations of Jews acculturating to bourgeois European society, Buber’s Hasidim were beacons of spiritual, religious, and national wholeness. As the historian Steven Asch­heim explains, the neoromantic embrace of a mysticism shunned by the German-Jewish bourgeoisie cut across political lines, and intellectuals from leftists such as Gustav Landauer and Georg Lukacs to Zionists like Margarete Susman, Salmon Schocken, and Arnold Zweig were united in their enthusiasm for “Buberian Hasidism.”22 It is not merely the title of Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona which resonates with images of the Hasidism promoted by Buber. The customs of Lasker-Schüler’s “Spanish” Jews conjure up images of eastern European Hasidim enthralled to charismatic “rebbes”: Von ihren Vätern vererbt, trugen die alten Juden den Tag in ihrer Herzen Kalender verzeichnet, an dem ihr höchster Rabbiner ihnen ­geboren ward. Am 7. des Monats Gâm wallfahrten Kinder und Kindes­kinder oben auf den Hügel in den Judenpalast, ihrem Wunderpriester Zweige der Wälder zu bringen. (10, 13–17/494–95) [The old Jews, heirs of their fathers, had inscribed on the calendar of their hearts the day on which their supreme rabbi had been born to them. On the seventh of the month of Gâm children and grandchildren made a pilgrimage up the hill to the Jews’ palace, to bring their wonder-working priest branches from the woods, hung with sweet and bitter berries. (225)]

Though the paganlike offering of the forest’s bounty is a narrative embellishment with connotations of German folkways,23 a Jewish pilgrimage to the “court” of a venerated religious leader in celebration of his birthday is an obvious reference to Hasidism. Similarly, the many ref-

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erences in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona to an ecstatic religion of the “heart” and its capacity to spread a naïve mystic enthusiasm evoke Buber’s popular presentations of Hasidic spirituality:24 Oft sahen [die Juden] den Wunderrabbiner lächeln; einmal klatschte er jubelnd in seine feinen langen Hände und gar im Gebet vor dem Altar, er hatte Jehova gesehen . . . und wurde—ein Kind. (10, 10–13/494) [They often saw the wonder-working Rabbi smiling; once he jubilantly clapped his slender, delicate hands, even in prayer before the altar, for he had seen Jehovah . . . and he became—a child. (225)]

What is a vaguely Hasidic “miracle rabbi” doing in a modernist romance that is structured like a miniature of a nineteenth-century ­German-Jewish historical novel? As images of the once-denigrated eastern European Hasidim coalesce with “Sephardic” scenarios from the historical novels of Heine and Ludwig Philippson, it appears that Lasker-Schüler’s tale is a transvaluation of a nineteenth-century ­German-Jewish tradition, privileging “Buberian” ecstatic mysticism where a Jewish religion of reason acceptable to the German Enlightenment once held sway. Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona seems to invert the nineteenth-century paradigm of “Sephardic supremacy” which instrumentalized Spanish Jewry to create historical fictions legitimizing an integrationist diaspora identity for German Jews. This embrace of all that bourgeois German Jewry shunned is close to the cultural Z ­ ionism Buber preached to Jewish youth in 1911 in his Drei Reden über das Judentum (On Judaism): “We need only to look at the decadent yet still wondrous Hasid of our days; to watch him as he prays to his God, shaken by his fervor, expressing with his whole body what his lips are saying . . . here, stunted and distorted yet unmistakable, is Asiatic strength and Asiatic inwardness.”25 Understood within the context of the Jewish cultural renaissance which inspired large segments of the young intelligentsia, Lasker-Schüler’s positive investment of terms like Wunderrabbiner and Alt-Asien emerges as a productive destabilization of bourgeois minority culture. Where the nineteenthcentury Jewish novelist selected images from history in order to fashion a new European identity, Lasker-Schüler appropriates the literary form of the “Sephardic” historical novel to accentuate Jewish difference. As

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the historian Michael Brenner points out, this affirmation of a “heretical ideal” in literature links Lasker-Schüler with writers such as Max Brod, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Jakob Wassermann, all of whom wrote historical fiction based on characters from Jewish history of whom nineteenth-century Jewish writers had taken a dim view.26 Lasker-Schüler’s text offers a new vision of Jewish history. In Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, teleological myths of modernization are abandoned as the nineteenth-century German-Jewish image of the noble Sephardic Jew dissolves and fuses with a new view of the Hasidic mystic.

From Barcelona to Jerusalem? The Politics of German-Jewish Modernism Lasker-Schüler’s evocation of images of Jewish otherness which bourgeois Judaism once scorned (Hasidism and the world of Yiddish-speaking Jewry in eastern Europe) suggests an affinity with the subversive agenda of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “minor literature” and with Franz Kafka’s own interest in what he saw as the “uncanny” qualities of Yiddish.27 And yet a mere inversion of nineteenth-century identityconstruction would do no more than provide an alternative, but nonetheless stable role for an imagined Jewish reader. A characterization of Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona as a “symbolic reterritorialization” incommensurable with a “minor literature” seems all the more justified in light of the Zionist agenda of Buber’s “rediscovery” of Hasidism: “The Jew can truly fulfill his vocation among the nations only when he begins anew, and, with his whole, undiminished, purified original strength, translates into reality what his religion taught him in antiquity: rootedness in his native land.”28 This mystification of a land-based life is the very opposite of the “deterritorialization” advocated by Deleuze and Guattari. To what extent does the narration of a “Zionist” move toward Palestine in Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona confirm Deleuze’s and Guattari’s conclusions about the political consequences of a minority literature that constructs an alternative identity through symbolism? A close reading of the textual dynamics of “reterritorialization” in Lasker-Schüler’s modernist tale suggests it does not.

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To be sure, Buber’s fusion of spiritual and political Zionism is echoed in Lasker-Schüler’s text as Eleazar responds to Barcelona’s Jews: Höher stieg in allen die Sehnsucht nach dem verlorenen Lande, das ihnen etwa nur verpachtet gewesen war, und jeder von ihnen benetzte feierlich das Beet seiner Erinnerung; wo sie landen würden, konnte ihnen auch nicht ihr Wunderrabbiner verraten; hatten doch einige jüngere Juden Wurzel gefaßt in Spaniens Erde berückendem Rosenrausch, auch ihre Schwestern mit den Jerusalemsaugen schmerzlich erweckt den Christ. Aber der besorgten Gemeinde antwortete Eleasar: “Wer das gelobte Land nicht im Herzen trägt, der wird es nie erreichen.” (10, 32–11, 3/495) [The yearning for their lost country, which they had possessed only on sufferance, rose higher in them all, and each of them solemnly watered the bed of his recollection; even their wonder-working rabbi could not tell them where they would land; for some young Jews had taken roots in the soil of Spain, in the enchanting perfume of roses, and their sisters with Jerusalem eyes had given Christians a painful awakening. But Eleazar replied to the worried community: “Anyone who does not bear the promised land in his heart will never get there.” (226)]

The Jews of Barcelona only long for a homeland of their own in reaction to persecution. Lasker-Schüler’s miracle rabbi answers them with a fiery call to abandon cultural assimilation and pursue spiritual renewal. The bond of the Jews to the Spain of their birth is described with a seductive metaphor of Romantic attachment to the soil, as is E ­ leazar’s rather commonplace countermetaphor of religious revival: “es wüßten nur wenige ihres Gottes Gärtner zu sein” (11, 7/496) [“only a few were able to be gardeners for their God” (226)]. Lasker-Schüler’s text does not, however, posit a return to the land as a facile panacea for a European Judaism facing both a cultural and an existential crisis. In Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, the prospect of an immediate return to Palestine does not galvanize the entire Jewish community of Barcelona. Instead, it leads to conflict as some Jewish elders join with representatives of Barcelona’s Christian society to implore Eleazar not to leave. Eleazar refuses to speak with the delegation—“denn was half es, zu Schlafenden zu reden!” (14, 31–32/500) [“for what was the use of talking to sleepers!” (229)]—and that night a pogrom begins.

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The portrayal of Zionism as a divisive force that incurs the opposition of established forces within diaspora Judaism is an element of historical realism. Here Lasker-Schüler’s text shows a parallel with a Zionist literary allegory such as Alfred Nossig’s 1906 play Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes.29 Yet whereas in Nossig’s drama (whose nationalist message is clear) a charismatic leader in historical guise overcomes characters representing “assimilationist” and “orthodox” objections to Zionism and successfully wins over Spanish-Jewish youth to his vision of immediate return to Palestine, Lasker-Schüler’s text reveals an ambivalent vision of the course of Jewish history. In the midst of the massacre of his flock, Lasker-Schüler’s miracle rabbi becomes apprehensive regarding a “territorial” Zionist solution for the oppressed Jews of Barcelona, a realization which he dares not reveal to them as they prepare to flee: “Aber daß Palästina nur die Sternwarte ihrer Heimat sei, wagte der Wunderrabbiner den müden Auserwählten nicht ins Gedächtnis zu rufen” (16, 22–25/503) [“But that Palestine was only the observatory to watch the stars of their home, that was something of which the wonder-working rabbi dared not remind the weary chosen people” (231)]. A forced “deterritorialization” has created a demand for territory which is grasped by Eleazar as a historical necessity even as he doubts its transcendent value. In the end, he prays for the ship that will carry the survivors to their destination. The dynamic of “reterrorialization” in Lasker-Schüler’s historical fable is portrayed as a loss. As the Jews of Barcelona depart, the miracle rabbi is radically disillusioned: “Der kämpfte weiter die ganze Nacht in Rätseln mit Gott; dunkelte und wand sich von ihm” (17, 11–13/504) [“All night he went out wrestling in riddles with God; darkened and broke away from Him” (231)]. Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunder­rabbiner von B ­ arcelona cannot be reduced to any one positive or negative statement on political Zionism. Rather, the text offers an unsettling vision, in which the place of the Jew in a European landscape is denied through violence of the most extreme and brutal sort. Pablo’s mother herself rips the heart of Amram’s father from his body, leaving him to a pack of wild dogs. The scene is at once horrifying and all too familiar: Und die Juden, die an den Namen Jehovas immer von neuem erwacht waren, lagen alle verstümmelt, zerbissen, Gesichte vom Körper getrennt, Kinderhände und Füßlein, zartestes Menschenlaub auf den Gassen umher, in die man die Armen wie Vieh getrieben hatte. (15, 20–24/501)

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[And the Jews, who had kept waking anew on hearing the name of Jehova, all lay mutilated, savaged, their faces separated from their bodies, children’s hands and tiny feet, tender human foliage, here and there in the alleys, into which these poor souls had been driven like cattle. (230)]

Yet as the slaughtered in Lasker-Schüler’s text hold on to faith, their miracle rabbi not only doubts the redemptive power of a new society in Palestine, but also the ultimate meaning of a divine power that would permit this carnage.30 Though Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona posits a “reterritorialization” as a necessary rescue, a concrete invocation of “home” is given only as a perverse image of rest for the dead in the tale’s concluding poem:31 Die Engel deckten wolkenweiß zum Himmelsmahle, Des hohen Heimgekehrten Herz nahm Gott aus seiner Schale, Zu prüfen das geweihte widerspenstige Erz, O Eleasars Herz rieb sich an Herz, Entbrannte seinen Stein! Jerusalem, in seinen Krug gieß deinen Wein Und laß ihn gären aufbewahrt im Tale. (17, 21–27/504) [The angels spread a cloud-white tablecloth for the heavenly meal, God took the heart of the high homecomer from its dish To test the stubborn consecrated ore, O Eleazar’s heart was rubbed on heart, Setting his stone ablaze! Into his jug, Jerusalem, pour your wine And let it ferment, stored up in the vale. (232)]

In Lasker-Schüler’s poem, images of life give way to the inorganic. Language itself is literally reduced as the word “heart” (Herz) decomposes to “ore” (Erz), the loss of the aspirated H amplifying an image of lifelessness. The possibility that this image of return to the soil could be seen as a triumphant homecoming is overshadowed by the magnitude of tragic death. Some survivors of the massacre may indeed reach Jerusalem’s valleys, but, for the Wunderrabbiner, the valley stands for the grave, not the promised land. Although the word Herz (and a renewed sense of human life and hope) is regained as the poem narrates the transcendent world beyond, it is once again lost. Eleazar’s heart ascends to heaven only to crowd among the hearts of those martyred

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in the mass slaughter. Indeed, even in the afterlife, the heart again becomes inorganic material: crammed among the hearts of the murdered, Eleazar’s heart paradoxically turns to stone as its passions are inflamed. In the story’s concluding poem, to become one with the soil, with “ore” and “stone,” signifies death rather than national rebirth. In Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, Jerusalem’s soil is not a site of miraculous blossom and victorious renewal, but of mourning and slow ferment. Against Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thesis that the reacquisition of territory through the symbol “enriches” language and validates Romantic nationalism, Lasker-Schüler demonstrates that a language that becomes one only with the land can only be a language of loss.

Minority Modernism? Lasker-Schüler and “Jewish” Language Although the politics of territory as represented in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona suggest a skepticism toward fixed positions consonant with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s requirements of a “minor literature,” it should be recalled that their notion of “deterritorialization” is above all an attribute of language. Deleuze and Guattari point to Kafka’s relation to Prague German and to Hebrew and Yiddish as a paradigm. Rather, say the French theorists, than turning to the “mythic language” of Hebrew or a “Hebrew-ifying” German, Kafka takes the German of his hometown (already more of a minority and “paper language” than a living idiom) and pushes it toward “a new sobriety, . . . absolute deterritorialization.”32 According to Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka was enthusiastic about Yiddish “less as a sort of linguistic territoriality for the Jews than as a nomadic movement toward deterritorialization that reworks the German language from within.” In their view, it is not Yiddish as the spoken language of a community that inspired Kafka but, instead, Yiddish as an imagined language of gesture, feeling, and the uncanny, a model for his own “unique and solitary form of writing.” Deleuze’s and Guattari’s portrait of Kafka is itself, of course, not immune to criticism. Implicitly calling into question Deleuze’s and Guattari’s inconsistent affirmation of a “minor literature” that always speaks for the politics of the collective over a symbolism which also marks

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difference, critic Mark Anderson’s reading of Josefine die S­ ängerin demonstrates that Kafka could indeed productively transform popular cultural stereotypes of a “Jewish” language to create a new vision of literary modernism’s relation to the minority collective.33 But the question of Lasker-Schüler’s relation to Yiddish, Hebrew, and “Jewish” uses of German has yet to be resolved. A fresh look at Lasker-Schüler’s connection to “Jewish” language can shed new light on Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona as an example of the possibilities of minority literary modernism. The issue of Lasker-Schüler’s view of Yiddish has been the subject of some misconceptions. To varying degrees, critics have seized on one of Lasker-Schüler’s letters to Martin Buber as a supposed expression of her alienation from “the main currents of the intellectual renaissance of Judaism that began to take shape in Germany.”34 The mercurial Lasker-Schüler had argued with Buber over whether the poet Stefan George was Jewish, and, in response to Buber’s calm insistence on the reality that he was not, she declared rashly: “Ich hasse die Juden, da ich David war oder Joseph—ich hasse die Juden, weil sie meine Sprache mißachten, weil ihre Ohren verwachsen sind und sie nach ­Zwergerei horchen und Gemauschel. Sie fressen zu viel, sie sollten hungern [I detest the Jews, as if I were David or Joseph—I hate the Jews because they neglect my language, because their ears are deformed and they heed the words of dwarfs and Yids. They gobble too much, they should go hungry].”35 Whereas the critic Jakob Hessing uses this letter to judiciously argue for an understanding of Buber and LaskerSchüler as representatives of distinct modes of response to the crisis of community facing assimilated Jews in twentieth-century Germany, his emphasis on the distance between their worldviews has led other critics to extreme conclusions. Judy Atterholt’s study absolutizes LaskerSchüler’s occasional polemic use of Gemauschel, a pejorative term for Yiddish and Yiddish-inflected German, charging her as “implicated . . . in the rhetoric of anti-Semitic discourse.”36 The fact that LaskerSchüler articulated such sentiments as part of an ongoing dialogue with a major Zionist figure should dismiss such exaggerations. The positive references to Hasidism in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, outlined above, testify to a positive reception of Buber’s new image of the Eastern Jew.

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Recent research shows that Lasker-Schüler could actively lend her support to Yiddish authors. Heather Valencia’s study of the GermanJewish poetess’s friendship with Yiddish writer Abraham Nochem ­Stenzel places Lasker-Schüler within the multilingual Jewish literary scene which flourished in 1920s Berlin.37 Lasker-Schüler met Stenzel in 1922 at the funeral of the Hebrew writer David Frischman, and she apparently intervened with Arnold Zweig to have Stenzel’s Fischerdorf translated into German.38 In turn, Stenzel presented a positive portrait of Lasker-Schüler to readers of the influential Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt.39 In addition, Lasker-Schüler sent the following message to the Yiddish avant-garde journal Albatros, edited by the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg when he resided in Berlin: “Ich widme das Wappen meiner Stadt dem Albatros—Prinz Jussuf [I dedicate my city’s coat of arms to ­Albatros—Prinz Jussuf].”40 While it is not my intention to somehow “claim” Lasker-Schüler for a Jewish subcultural sphere or national movement, her ties to minority cultural institutions and to the multi­ lingual Jewish literary revival in the 1920s have yet to be presented in full.41 Though Lasker-Schüler did not take part in the critical language debates that animated Jewish cultural life in this tumultuous period (where lines between Yiddishists, Hebraists, Zionists, non-Zionist cultural nationalists, and all stripes of leftists and integrationists were drawn in complex ways), her poem in honor of Abraham Stenzel (unpublished during her lifetime) shows a respectful acknowledgment of Yiddish, even as she makes clear that it falls short of her ideal of a “Jewish” language—one that harkens back to the Orient, to the desert, to Hebrew: Abraham Stenzel Begraben sind die Bibeljahre längst. Wir beide tragen nur noch sehnsüchtig Den Flor um unseren blauen Hut. Mein Spielgefährte Hamid Stenzel: Er gärte mit dem Mark im Stamm Der Gottesbäume auf dem Libanon. Der Sturm vertrieb ihn aus der Heimat In ein hartes Land. —Man ihm die ehrwürdige Sprache steinigte.

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Und seine Zunge stolpert über das Hebräisch. Er spricht seitdem des Gettos: Jiddisch Platt.   ... [Seine] großen Jordanaugen. Die erinnern An die Erzväter sich.   ... Wenn wir nach Mitternacht Im Winter durch die Straßen Zwei edle Lasttiere trabten Zusammen leiernd durch den Schnee— Wie in der Wüste klangs— —Kopf gebeugt—überall: Saharah . . . Und jedem Winde blickt er nach, Der liebreich über seine schwarzen Haare streicht, Denn seiner Verse Muse Kabala Trägt ihn im Arm.42

[Abraham Stenzl Biblical times are long since buried. We both still longingly wear the mourner’s band around our blue hats. My playmate Hamid Stenzl: he fermented with the marrow in the trunk of the holy trees in Lebanon. The storm drove him from his homeland into a hard country. By stoning took from him the honorable language. And his tounge now stumbles over Hebrew. Since then he speak the ghetto idiom: Yiddish Platt.   ... (His) great Jordan eyes. They recall the Patriarchs.   ...

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And when after midnight through the streets in winter we two noble beasts of burden trotted Together playing lyres through the snow— As it once resounded in the desert— —With bowed heads—everywhere: Saharah . . . And he stops to look at every wind, That lovingly strokes our black hair, For his muse, the kabbalah, Takes him by the arm.]

Lasker-Schüler’s equation of Yiddish with German dialect (“Platt”) is both a jab and a legitimation. Lasker-Schüler herself would sometimes use dialect affectionately in her letters. Yet the poetic language she fondly recalls sharing with Stenzel is not the “comic” liveliness of a living regional idiom. Rather, it is a literary language predicated on exile, the loss of the language of the Bible, that Lasker-Schüler’s poem understands as the point of departure for the modern Jewish poet. Her poem takes up an image of poverty, emptiness, and dryness—the “­Saharah”—and paradoxically celebrates the desert cry which, more than faintly recalling the Jews’ Levantine past, emphasizes the unattain­ability of such a Romantic “origin.” Roaming snowy streets (Berlin’s perhaps?), Stenzel may find a muse in Jewish mysticism, but the German-language modernist is herself not carried along by kabbalah. Lasker-Schüler’s poem seems to fulfill what Deleuze and Guattari define as the goal of a “minor literature”: “To bring language slowly and progressively to the desert. To use syntax in order to cry, to give a syntax to the cry.”43 In dialogue with a contemporary Yiddish writer, Lasker-Schüler holds up a notion of a poetic language which encompasses an “honorable” (ehrwürdig) Jewish speech buried in the sands of the past, as well as the arid song to which those in the present are limited. In the following, it is my aim to demonstrate that Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona represents Lasker-Schüler’s gesture toward just such a new language of Jewish literary modernism. Lasker-Schüler scholar Sigrid Bauschinger has noted how Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona intensifies the liberties with German syntax which the writer takes in other works.44 Bauschinger catalogs false

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inversions, missing conjunctions, and subordinate clauses which become independent of main clauses, as well as nouns with incorrectly gendered articles and odd uses of comparative adverbs. Bauschinger attributes Lasker-Schüler’s “capricious” use of language to “the emotional force with which the story was written” (183). Building on Bauschinger’s observations, it is my contention that Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona is also marked by certain idiosyncratic uses of German which suggest a conscious gesture toward a “Jewish” literary language. Notwithstanding the evidence of the positive aspects of LaskerSchüler’s relation to Yiddish presented above, it would be wrong to understand Lasker-Schüler’s odd syntax as her attempt to recoup the problematic tradition of literary representations of Yiddish in German in order to emphasize the Eastern Jewish connotations that a term like Wunderrabbiner brings to her story.45 Instead, one should recall Lasker-Schüler’s well-known retort to Uri Zwi Greenberg’s offer to translate her poems into Hebrew: “But they are in Hebrew!”46 Zionist critics have tended to take Lasker-Schüler at her word, finding evidence of a Hebrew spirit in her German. Greenberg presented the German-Jewish poetess to readers of the Tel-Aviv newspaper Davar as “Deborah in captivity,” calling her words, “Hebrew siphoned into foreign vessels.”47 Alice Jacob-Loewenson, an early translator of LaskerSchüler’s poetry into Hebrew, concurred, seeing “Jewish essence” in the writer’s language and style as well as in the content.48 Jacob-­Loewenson claims, “one could almost speak of a Hebrew German,” pointing to the concentration of verse construction and the omission of ancillary words as affinities with Hebrew.49 Though the former is unique to Lasker-Schüler’s poetry, the latter could be extended to her prose. But in contrast to attempts to distill “essential” Hebrew features of LaskerSchüler’s language, I would like to point instead to her use of (perhaps intentionally) false Hebraisms in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona. Lasker-Schüler evokes biblical Hebrew in her use of the genitive to express the superlative. A phrase such as “die Toten der Toten” (1, 32/503) (“the dead of the dead” [231]) recalls well-known examples (“the song of songs,” “the king of kings,” “the holy of holies”). Lasker-Schüler’s prose recalls another important feature of biblical ­Hebrew, the paronomasia, with a pseudo-paronomasia such as “erlosch ihre ­Erleuchtung” (17, 20/504) [“extinguished their enlightenment”

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(232)].50 This estrangement of German through odd syntax and hints of Hebraisms combines with the story’s content to emphasize Jewish difference. Lasker-Schüler thus anticipates the much-discussed German translation of the Bible by Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (conceived in 1914, but first published in 1924), though certainly without the systematic philosophical and cultural agenda which motivated these two learned theologians to re-Hebraicize scripture for a Jewish readership that no longer had access to the original text.51 Rather, Lasker-Schüler’s nod toward a Jewish language seems, at first glance, emblematic of what historian Paul Mendes-Flohr terms an “aesthetic affirmation” of Judaism, a sincere but politically soft commitment to Jewish culture typical of assimilated western European intellectuals in the early twentieth century.52 Neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, Lasker-Schüler crafts a modernist idiom in German by adopting cliches of “Jewish” language which simulate the strangeness and power of an ancient Oriental tongue. Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona is, however, no mere substitution of aesthetic pose for “Jewish” substance. Instead, her modernist prose exhibits a mature suspicion about the conditions of minority discourse. Lasker-Schüler’s narrative is marked by a fluid perspective. Her narrative alternates between zero-focalization; the focalizing figures of Eleazar, the mob, Pablo, Amram (and others); and passages where it is difficult to identify a focalizer. The following passage appears to be Pablo’s silent reflections as he observes a prayer service in the synagogue: Die Gebote der Gebetbücher der Juden wurden von außen nach innen gelesen, ihre Judenaugen mußten darum vom Beginn ihrer A­usgeburt anders wie die der gesamten Völker gerichtet worden sein. Augen, die sich nicht am Ziel zu bleiben getrauten, Augen, die sich versteckten in des Buches Heftung, sich flüchteten immer zurück in den Spalt, “Augen, die stehlen”—meinte der Bürgermeister betonend zu seinem erbleichenden Sohn. (13, 17–24/498–99) [The commandments in the Jews were read from the outside to the inside, and so, ever since their birth, their Jewish eyes had to be pointed in a different direction from those of all other nations. Eyes that dared not remain fixed on their object, eyes that hid in the book’s stiching, always fled back to the column. “Eyes that steal”— declared the mayor firmly to his blenching son. (228)]

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This passage is a parody of persistent traditional anti-Jewish tropes about a stubborn religion of the letter of the law and a “secret language of the Jews.”53 Within the context of Lasker-Schüler’s story, these are the prejudices of Barcelona’s Christian society with which Pablo breaks. But as Pablo beholds customs which are strange to him, the notion that Jewish difference is defined through an alien mode of reading impresses him above all. But rather than a profound assertion of an essentially Jewish hermeneutic approach to scripture, the observation that the Jews read “from outside to inside” is the narrator’s ironic presentation of Pablo’s innocence of Jewish ways. The idea of a specifically “Jewish” approach to language is exposed as an antiSemitic construction, and yet Lasker-Schüler’s deployment of peculiar syntax and other linguistic oddities easily dismissable as “foreign” seems to invite such an identification. Apparently aware that a hostile society would always see minority discourse as alien, Lasker-Schüler’s modernism transforms perceived difference into a productive principle. Lasker-Schüler’s “aesthetic affirmation” of Jewish difference through a new literary language calls into question the categories of “authenticity” upon which the easy identifications of the nineteenth-century historical novel were based. Thus, Der Wunderrabbiner von B ­ arcelona’s curious amalgamation of the image of Spanish Jewry inherited from the nineteenth-century Jewish historical novel with the twentieth-­ century celebration of the Eastern Jew is not to be understood as simply the substitution of an “authentic” counterimage for an earlier identification-figure. Lasker-Schüler’s historical symbols are slippery and inexact. If the “miracle rabbi of Barcelona” simultaneously recalls the Sephardic heroes of Philippson’s novels and the Hasidic mystics that Buber translated, it is because Lasker-Schüler’s modernist symbols defy realist historical specificity, condensing diverse chapters from Jewish history into a fluid yet constant image of otherness. Rather than emptying these symbols of their historical content, Lasker-Schüler’s modernist Jewish romance extends the vision of Jewish modernity implicit in Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach. In Heine’s tale, the apostate Spanish Jew Don Isaak Abarbanel and the enlightened German Rabbi Abraham ironically share the same fate. Though Heine’s fragment concludes in 1489, the coming catastrophe of ­Inquisition and expulsion in 1492 would turn both into refugees from

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persecution. Heine’s unfinished novel unmasks the dynamic of modern Jewish history as a “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) created by an anti-Semitism which will not spare the Jew who has left ­Judaism behind. In the same way, Lasker-Schüler’s narrative understands that the past, present, and future of Jewish history collapse and are united before the very real force of murderous persecution. If Lasker-Schüler’s prose adopts a “Jewish” usage of German, it is in her complex relation to the minority discourse established by nineteenth-century writers, the tradition of the German-Jewish historical novel. As the following section will illustrate, Lasker-Schüler’s modernist historical symbolism challenges Deleuze’s and Guattari’s exclusion of the symbol (especially the Jewish symbol) from their inventory of “minor” literary characteristics. Hardly an example of “mythic flight,”54 Lasker-Schüler’s historical symbols are critical reworkings of Jewish literary tradition.

Gender and the Jewish Historical Subject: Lasker-Schüler’s Revisions In Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, the central saga of Eleazar the miracle rabbi is intertwined with the story of a young woman: Es lebte eine Dichterin im Judenvolke Barcelonas, Tochter eines vornehmen Mannes, der mit dem Bau der Aussichtstürme der großen Städte Spaniens betraut war. Arion Elevantos im Wunsch nach einem Bauerben erzog Amram, seine Tochter, wie einen Sohn. (496) [Among the Jewish people of Barcelona there lived a poetess, the daughter of a distinguished man who had the task of building the watchtowers of Spain’s great cities. Wishing for an heir to his building empire, Arion Elevantros brought up Amram, his daughter, like a son. (226)]

As Lasker-Schüler’s female protagonist is given the masculine name “Amram,” the symbolic certainty of the name, the foundation of any narrative of identification, is challenged. No mere examples of colorful exotic imagery, the names of Lasker-Schüler’s characters are a kaleidoscope through which a complex field of gender, religious, and ethnic perspectives can be viewed.

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The names of the Jewish figures in Der Wunderrabbiner von Barce­ lona carry suggestive biblical associations. Amram was the father of Moses and Aaron (Exod. 6:18, 20; Num. 26:58–59), and was thus the patriarch of the priestly tribe. (Lasker-Schüler includes an illustration of Amram in her book [Figure 14].) “Arion” is easily deciphered as a variation on the German spelling “Aron,” and Eleazar, the miracle rabbi, bears the name of the biblical Aaron’s son. The literal meaning of the Hebrew name Amram is “the people is exalted.” The root word for people (Am) might imply a collective significance for the figure, in line with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s postulate of the collective nature of all “minor” literature. But what sort of collective might Amram’s fate stand for? Her name is imposed and her love for the non-Jewish Pablo is an implicit rebellion against tradition. Could her flight from an assigned sexual and religious identity signify a rejection of any notion of the ethnic collective? Or might her Hebrew name point to a positive conception of a collective rooted in Jewish tradition, a countermodel to the false collective of the murderous mob, a tradition open to anyone who learns to read “from the outside to the inside” (228)? Lasker-Schüler’s symbolism opens up a range of possibilities, all of them consonant with the notion of “deterritorialization.” As mentioned above, the names of all Jewish figures in Der Wunder­ rabbiner von Barcelona refer to the tribe of priests. Interestingly, Lasker-Schüler’s tale reverses the hierarchy of the biblical genealogy,

Figure 14. Else Lasker-Schüler, illustration to Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1921).

Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona

with those lower in status and age taking the names of increasingly senior biblical figures. This variation on the biblical intertext serves to make concrete a metaphor for an important principle of Jewish religious thought, that of egalitarian access to the sacred.55 The Jews of Lasker-Schüler’s Barcelona are quite literally a “kingdom of priests.” The phrase is found in Exodus 19:6: “You shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy people.” The notion of the Jewish people as a “kingdom of priests” took on new meaning in nineteenth-century Germany, when Jewish reformers stressed the concept of a “universal priesthood” as justification for a new diaspora identity. Theologians such as Abraham Geiger abandoned the belief that the messianic goal of Jewish history entailed the restoration of the traditional priesthood and its cult, and they interpreted this biblical passage as a delegitimation of any hierarchy that would fix Jewish ritual for all time.56 ­Instead, German-Jewish reformers revived the idea of a “Jewish mission,” giving a traditional concept a decidedly antinationalist cast in the age of the modern nation-state.57 In the view of those who represented the mainstream of integrationist Judaism in the West, the biblical imperatives to be a “kingdom of priests” and a “light unto the nations” (Isa. 49:6) were understood as the foundation of a religion which saw messianic purpose in the fulfillment of Enlightenment promise in the diaspora rather than in the recovery of a lost national life. As in traditional Judaism, the subjects of history were seen as God and the Jewish people, but the terrestrial trajectory of that history now led “from” rather than “back to” the land of Israel. Lasker-Schüler’s text picks up on this notion of Judaism as an egalitarian spiritual aristocracy with a universal mission. The narrator’s appellation for the Jews of Barcelona—“Edeljuden” (495, translated by Robertson as “Jewish nobility”; 226)—might be understood in this context. Most importantly, the holy text which Eleazar consults, the (fictional) “atlas of creation” [Atlas der Schöpfung (502, 230)], confirms the conventional nineteenth-century German-Jewish integrationist conception of Judaism. Eleazar reads from the Atlas der Schöpfung at a crucial moment in the narrative. The butchery of Barcelona’s Jews is underway, but the miracle rabbi, secure in his palace, hears false rumors that his followers have boarded ships and anxiously await their departure for the Holy

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Land. The historical and messianic significance of such an event is alluded to as it coincides with the approaching Passover holiday: Aber die Abendwinde, die süßen Lügnerinnen, die um des großen Wunderrabbiners Palast sangen, brachten träumerisch falsche Märchen. “An den Hecken sitzen arglos deine Söhne, Eleasar, und zählen die Tage und die Stunden, die sie von Palästina trennen, und mit Seide und Perlen sticken die feinen Töchter Davids Kissen für deine segnenden Hände, Eleasar. Bald naht das Osterfest, und die Bäcker backen fromme ungesäuerte Brote für deinen Tisch, großer Wunderrabbiner.” (501–2) [But the evening breezes, the sweet liars who sang outside the palace of the great wonder-working rabbi, told tales that were dreamlike and false. “Your sons are sitting by the hedges, Eleazar, suspecting nothing, counting the days and the hours that separate them from Palestine, and the delicate daughters of David are embroidering cushions with silk and pearls for the blessings of your hands. The feast of Passover is approaching, and the bakers are baking pious unleavened bread for your table, great wonder-working rabbi.” (230)]

Lasker-Schüler’s narrator makes note of the gendered division of Barce­lona’s Jewish customs, which were also remarked as Pablo observed the prayer service: “Die Frauen hinter den Gittern bebten leise” (498) [“The women behind the railings quaked gently” (228)]. But Eleazar’s attention is centered on the theological meaning of the cataclysmic events of the moment. The “atlas of creation” is, of course, where the wonder-working rabbi turns for guidance regarding scripture’s implications for geopolitical action in a time of crisis. The language of the Atlas der Schöpfung—at once vibrant, rarified, and giddy—mocks that of a religious text, but also offers a sincere ­vision of a utopian map where the peoples of the world all have a secure place in the divine plan: Der blätterte im Atlas der Schöpfung und las, wie in der Anfänglichkeit der Vater aus Erde und Wasser die Welt seinen “Hochzeitsmannakuchen”, ballte, mit allen goldenen Zutaten seines himmlichen Blutes und den Menschen, der großen Weltenform entnahm und aus ihm wieder mächtig holte die Völker und Völkervölker und Völkervölkervölker und lud sie ein zum gemeinsamen Mahle. (502)

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[He leafed through the atlas of creation and read how at the beginning of things the Father made the world of earth and water and squeezed it into a ball, his “wedding manna-cake,” with all the golden ingredients of His heavenly blood, and how he took man from the great shape of the world and from him in turn He powerfully drew the nations and the nations’ nations and the nations’ nations’ nations and invited them all to eat together. (230)]

The holy text in Lasker-Schüler’s tale goes on to affirm the idea of ­Israel’s election among the peoples of the world: An seiner Seite Herzen aber setzte er die Juden, da sie ihm unter allen Völkern, gering an Zahl, nach seinem großen Wink und darum ihm verantwortlicher und zärtlicher geraten waren. “Und der allgütige Vater”, lobpreiste singend Eleasar, pflückte einen Stern von seinem Kleide, und hob das Kind unter den Völkern zu sich empor und setzte das Licht in seine braune Stirn.”(502) [By His heart, however, He placed the Jews, for though they were few, of all the nations it was they who had turned out most in accordance with His orders and hence they were more obedient to him and more tender. “And the all-loving Father,” praised Eleazar singing, “plucked a star from His robe, and lifted up the child among the nations and placed the light on his brown forehead.” (230)]

Up until this point in the text, Lasker-Schüler’s “wonder-working rabbi” had echoed the traditional piety of the Hasidim. But the conception of “chosenness” to which he now refers is more reminiscent of the cosmopolitan ideals of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism than of the cosmological system of Lurianic kabbalah which formed the background to Hasidism:58 Mit dieser kleinen Entlichtung am göttlichen Leibe des Wächters der Welt entfaltete der Herr die erleuchteten Juden zum Volk der Propheten, ihm zu dienen in jedem Lande, in jedem Volke, auf allen Wegen. Amen. Den großen Geschwistervölkern aber ersetzte er den erhabenen Strahl, da er ihnen Heimat bereitete zwischen dem grünen Laub der Augusterde, auf der wiegenden erfrischenden Rast des ­Wassers und unter dem reinen Winterschnee der Lüfte, zu wahren liebevolle Ordnung ein jeglicher Mensch weise unter den Menschen der Völker über aller Völker Menschen. (502–3)

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[With this little light (Entlichtung) on the divine body of the world’s guardian, the Lord made the enlightened (erleuchteten) Jews into the people of the prophets, to serve Him in every land, in every nation, on every road. Amen. For the great sibling nations, however, instead of the glorious ray, He made a home for them amid the green foliage of the August earth, in the rocking, refreshing rest of the water and beneath the pure winter snow of the breezes, to maintain a loving order, and every man, amid the men of all nations, should point to men above the nations. (230–31)]

Lasker-Schüler’s “Atlas of Creation” (Atlas der Schöpfung) contains fragments of several strands in Jewish thought. The notion of creation as a contraction of the divine substance (in Lasker-Schüler’s words, “Entlichtung”) comes indeed from the kabbalah of Isaac Luria.59 However, the idea of the Jewish people as a Volk der Propheten whose explicit mission is to serve God throughout the world as a people without a homeland (Heimat) that encourages the world to recognize “humans” (Menschen) above ethnicities (Völker) is hardly a Hasidic notion of the “healing of the world” (tikkun ha-olam), which would instead advocate a more “active” messianism through special ceremonies and the joyful fulfillment of the commandments. By contrast, the notion of a prophetic mission is a popular idea of the integrationist Judaism born in nineteenth-century Germany, whose most prominent espousers were Hermann Cohen and Ludwig Philippson, the author of Jakob Tirado.60 Lasker-Schüler’s miracle rabbi affirms this version of liberal German Judaism’s “deterritorializing” message—until the incomprehensible massacre causes him to turn from God and take revenge. The symbols in Lasker-Schüler’s modernist narrative cannot be reduced to any one level of content. Does Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona expose a ­belief in a diaspora mission as a grim illusion? Or does the “Atlas of Creation” (Atlas der Schöpfung) contain traces of a utopian vision which must not be silenced by a fictional mob whose all-too-real counterparts would destroy more than Lasker-Schüler could have ever imagined in 1921? Eleazar is alternately a Hasid heralding a form of Buberian cultural Zionism, a Sephardic rabbi whose interpretations of scripture match those of his nineteenth-century German-Jewish emulators, and a tragic figure who ultimately rejects both positions. The deep am-

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bivalence of Lasker-Schüler’s imagery refutes Deleuze’s and Guattari’s critical assertion that symbols offer a stable literary ground where “reterritorializing” modernists can retreat from a duty to push language beyond comfortable limits of expression. Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona alludes to conflicting notions of the course of history, none of which emerges triumphant from the narrative’s bloody conclusion. Eleazar’s complex fate cannot be simplified to one vision of Jewish history. The reader of Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona can never be sure whether political Zionism has won a hollow victory over integrationist universalism, or if cynical nihilism has nullified mystic traditionalism, or if the reverse is true. But what of Amram and her interconnected story? Lasker-Schüler’s heroine vanishes in the middle of the text. The following analysis will show how the flight of this crossnamed poetess from Lasker-Schüler’s narrative revises the tradition of the subject of Jewish history handed down from the nineteenth-century historical novel. Although the figure of a Jewish poetess with a colorful masculine title would seem to invite comparison with her author, scholars who have centered their attention on the dizzying interplay of autobiography and art in Lasker-Schüler’s oeuvre have hesitated at the anomalous figure of Amram. Alfred Bodenheimer claims that Amram is another instance of Lasker-Schüler’s “Selbstmetaphorisierung” (turning herself into a metaphor) but he balks at an interpretation, noting that, unlike “Malik” or “Jussuf, Prinz von Theben,” Lasker-Schüler never adopted the name “Amram” in her correspondence.61 Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien tellingly omits Amram from her survey of the male persona in LaskerSchüler’s work.62 But whereas Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona is certainly not without references to Lasker-Schüler’s life,63 Amram is best understood in the context of Lasker-Schüler’s critical reception of literary tradition rather than through an exploration of the story’s confessional content. In Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, the imposition of a male name upon the daughter points to a nexus of religious, sexual, and ethnic identity in a decidedly bourgeois society: “Arion Elevantos im Wunsch nach einem Bauerben erzog Amram, seine Tochter, wie einen Sohn” (496) [“Wishing for an heir to his building empire, Arion E ­ levantros brought up Amram, his daughter, like a son” (226)].64 In  Lasker-

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Schüler’s text, a name which is symbolic of religious values and ethnic belonging is administered as part of a pedagogical program linked unambiguously to the social and economic mores of the middle class. This imposition of a male identity on Elevantos’s daughter is ambivalent, for the denial of sexual self-determination nonetheless becomes a vehicle for participation in the sphere of construction, activity, and power: “Amram ­bestieg jeden frühen Morgen mit ihrem Vater die Neubauten, die ­höchsten Gerippe der Stadt, daß sie oft glaubte, bei Gott zu Gast gewesen zu sein” (496) [“Early each morning Amram and her father ascended the incomplete buildings, the high skeletons of the town, so that she often thought she had been paying a visit to God” (226)]. It is also ambiguous, for it is unclear what role the daughter with a male name assumes in society. The mayor’s son Pablo certainly recognizes her as a woman, and when he visits the synagogue in the hope of finding the object of his affection, Amram seems to be seated in the ­women’s section: “Die Frauen hinter den Gittern bebten leise, und Amram fühlte einen ­fremden Erdteil wachsen zwischen sich und dem Senor Pablo, dem Bürgermeistersohn” (498) [“The women behind the railings quaked gently, and Amram felt a foreign continent growing between her and Señor Pablo, the mayor’s son” (228)]. Lasker-­Schüler’s text once again uses land as an unstable symbol. It is intentionally obscure whether the “foreign continent” (literally: “foreign piece of earth”) which expresses the sexual tension between Jewess and gentile is a bridge or a barrier. In any event, the plot is set in motion as the romance between Amram and Pablo signifies a twin revolt against the bias of Barcelona’s Christians and the sexual and ethnic destiny (symbolized by the name “Amram”) that the Jewish father wills for his daughter. The linear plots of the nineteenth-century novel were driven by the question of inheritance. The transfer of property, culture, and the family name to the next generation, accomplished through a system of marriages, had to overcome obstacles that threatened to disrupt this ordered economy. And so, too, it was in the nineteenth-century historical novels about Jewish history. In the age of Walter Scott’s ­Ivanhoe, the subject of Jewish history became the Jewish daughter, and the drama of Jewish history revolved around the temptation of assimilation and conversion, presented in fictional form as a romance with a Christian, usually a knight.

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These melodramas of the Jewish daughter drew on rich literary ­models. Scott’s Ivanhoe, Shakespeare’s Shylock, Lessing’s Natan der Weise, and especially his bourgeois tragedy plays (Emilia Galotti) were blended into a formula which became the substance of didactic historical novels, many written by rabbis or lay activists. A theme familiar to the Jewish Bildungsbürger in an age of cultural integration, the daughter as the (tragic or heroic) guardian of virtue, was adapted to scenes from Jewish history in novels such as Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen (1837) or Eugen Rispart’s Die Kreuzfahrer und die Juden unter Richard Löwenherz (The Crusaders and the Jews Under Richard the Lionheart; 1841).65 By resisting the non-Jewish noblemen, these fictional Jewish Emilia Galottis projected backward in time secured the course of Jewish history against assimilation through intermarriage, which, although it was for the most part a greater tendency among Jewish men than Jewish women in nineteenth-century Germany, was often blamed on women who failed to safeguard Jewish culture.66 Jewish educators saw the popular literary form of the historical novel for youth as a vehicle for promoting the preservation of religious identity.67 In Ludwig Philippson’s historical novel Jakob Tirado, for example, the Portuguese Jews who flee the Inquisition to renew Jewish life in Amsterdam include among their number the attractive young Maria Nunnez. Their ship is intercepted by the English navy, and a noble English captain courts Maria. Philippson leaves no room for ambivalence, as his heroine quickly declares, “Duke, I am a Jewess, I want to be one and must be one.”68 Even women writers such as the English Grace Aguilar (1816–47), whose novel The Vale of Cedars; or, The Martyr was translated into German in 1860, upheld this pedagogical literary model.69 Against the background of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novel which used the female subject to weave new narratives of Jewish identity in an age of integration and embourgeoisement, creating an optimistic notion of historical progress where Jews could find a place as Jews in a new landscape of historical tolerance, Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona represents a radical revision. The fact that the non-Jewish suitor is identified, not as a knight or nobleman, but rather as a mayor’s son (Bürgermeistersohn) (498) unmasks the historical settings of the romances of the Philipp-

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sons and Grace Aguilar as thin veils for the concerns of a bourgeois age (drawing on the ambiguity of the German word Bürger: “citizen” and “bourgeois”). The representation of religious and ethnic identity as an imposition of a male name on the female subject now appears as an analogy for a literary pedagogy against which LaskerSchüler’s tale rebels. The interrconnection of biblical name and sexual identity in LaskerSchüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona is elucidated through a comparison with the early “Sephardic” historical novel, Philippson’s Die Marannen. The central figure of Philippson’s tale is a young Jewish woman named Dinah, who loses her family in the siege of Granada and is taken in by the famous court Jew and Bible scholar Isaac Abarbanel. Her name is by no means arbitrary, and when the Jewish orphan Dinah meets the gallant Spanish “Old Christian” Don Alonso, the images of vulnerability that the reader associates with the biblical Dinah (raped by the uncircumcised Schechem; Gen. 34) come alive. By contrast, Lasker-Schüler’s text retains the notion of sexual threat, but tellingly displaces it. To the benign and innocent Pablo, Amram recounts a story of child molestation: Denn [Pablo] gedachte der Heimlichkeit der Stunde, wie sie noch Kinder waren und Amram seine “Braut”, diese Engelin der ­Heerscharen gegürtet, im Auge das Licht, ihm erzählte, sie habe wie der Prophet den Ägypter, der den Juden in seinem Sklavenjoch mißhandelte, den Schneider mit ihrem kleinen Dolch ermordet und ihn verscharrt in den Sand. Schneider nannten die Kinder den dünnbeinigen, knochigen Zuckerwarenhändler, der hinter der Schule seinen kleinen Laden ­verwartete und berüchtigt war, sich an Judenkindern oft vergangen zu haben. Er bezichtigte die unschuldigen Geschöpfe des Diebstahls, i­ndem er vorher wie ein Hexenmeister Naschwerk in ihre Taschen zu zaubern verstand. Drohend, den Eltern ihre Verbrechen zu übermitteln, ließen die jungen jammernden Opfer, die er in ein dumpfes Kellerloch ins Erdgeschoß zerrte, die schmutzigen Lüste mit sich geschehen. (499) [For (Pablo) was recalling the secrecy of the time when they were still children and Amram his “bride,” when this she-angel of the heavenly hosts had girded herself, with light in her eye, and told him that she had murdered the tailor with her little dagger and buried him in the sand, as the prophet did the Egyptian who maltreated the Jews under

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the yoke of slavery. “Tailor” was the children’s name for the bony, skinny-legged sweet-seller, who kept his little shop behind the school and was notorious for often having attacked Jewish children. He accused the innocent creatures of theft, after he had magically put sweets in their pockets like a wizard. Threatening to tell their parents about his crimes, the young, wailing victims, whom he dragged into a dark subterranean hole in his house, let him satisfy his filthy lust on them. (228)]

It should be recalled that childhood and Judaism are brought into association in Lasker-Schüler’s text when Eleazar is said to have become “a child” (225; the German is found on 10, 13/494), as a result of a mystical experience. Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona radicalizes the substratum of imagery in the nineteenth-century Jewish historical novel which connects Judaism with images of vulnerability and victimization. In contrast to the “Sephardic” historical novels of the nineteenth century, the threatened historical subject is no longer gendered feminine. The metonymic meaning of the symbolic sufferings of a struggling heroine is undermined because it is diffused—a figure like Philippson’s Dinah is drained of its power to symbolize “the threatened Jewish people” because the woman whose name refers to the collective (Amram) is no longer the center of a simple melodrama. The drama of Jewish history as the preservation of religious identity in an age when the gates of assimilation were opened is now relativized against the background of an apocalyptic rampage which breaks apart the very ground on which that history can take root. Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona refutes the charges made by Deleuze and Guattari, that symbolism leads to an aesthetically and politically regressive literature of territory. This is clear in one of the story’s final images. Like the biblical Samson smashing the Philistine’s temple, Eleazar destroys his palace with his bare hands: An die Säulen seines Hauses rüttelte der Priester, bis sie brachen wie Arme. Ihr Dach rollte in schweren Blöcken herab und zertrümmerte die Häuser der Straße. Ein ungeheuer Steinbruch aber, Er, der große Wunderrabbiner, ein Volk stürtzte sich vom heiligen Hügel, den das goldene zerbröckelte Mosaik der Kuppel verklärte. (504) [The priest shook the pillars of his house till they broke like arms. The roof rolled down in heavy blocks and shattered the houses in the

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street. An enormous quarry, He, the great wonder-working rabbi, a nation (Volk) plunged from the sacred hill, which was transfigured by the golden fragments of the dome’s mosaic. (231–32)]

Lasker-Schüler’s modernism subverts the very symbols it constructs, while pointing to the collective consequences of a “deterritorialization” which also problematizes the identity of that collective. The opulent ornament of Eleazar’s palace, which once stood firm on a Barcelona hilltop, may have once represented that unity of symbol and land that Deleuze and Guattari term a “reterritorialization.” But as it is broken apart, Lasker-Schüler’s destabilizing syntax not only leaves the historical subject with no firm ground to stand on, but also questions what the subject might be. Eleazar as a historical agent? A Volk as a collective subject leaping to a fate unknown?70 Or an inanimate pile buried in the rubble of historical catastrophe? In the ruins of Lasker-Schüler’s Barcelona, the fragments lose nothing of their symbolic power.

Fi v e  “Where books are burned . . . ” Jewish Memoriest of Inquisition and Expulsion in Nazi Germany and in Exile

The infamous book burnings of 1933 gave a chilling new resonance to Hassan’s pronouncement in Heinrich Heine’s play Almansor (1823): “That was merely a prelude, where books are burned, they’ll end up burning people, too.”1 In Paris, where Heine once lived in exile, German refugees from Hitler inaugurated a “Heinrich Heine Prize,” awarded annually to young writers on the anniversary of the May 10 book burnings on Berlin’s Opernplatz.2 As Heine’s works were segregated out of “German” libraries and in many cases consigned to the flames in Nazi demonstrations, the historical symbolism which ­Heine had crystalized in his Rabbi von Bacherach one hundred years before—themes of reconquista, Inquisition, expulsion, and auto-­da-fé, juxtaposed with reflections on Jewish integration in modern Germany—remained central to Jewish cultural memory, yet the meaning of these historical symbols changed as “dissimilation” took on a new, negative meaning under the National Socialists. The new reality was captured in the illustrations to a new edition of Der Rabbi von Bacherach published in Berlin in 1937 by Schocken, one of the Jewish presses to which writers of Jewish origin were now confined in the new Germany.3 In one striking image, Rabbi Abraham and Beautiful Sara look down from a ledge to contemplate the Rhein below and the town, Bacherach, which they had to flee in order to escape a massacre of Jews (Figure 15). Ludwig Schwerin’s drawing imagines a scene that is not actually present in Heine’s original tale. In Heine’s text, Rabbi Abraham points out “the Angel of Death [who] now hovers down there over Bacherach” as he and Sara escape in a boat. Schwerin’s innovative illustration reflects the mood of German Jews under National Socialism: a darkened sky and a sense of standing

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“Where books are burned . . . ”

dangerously close to the edge.4 Even in their greatest period of crisis thus far, Heine’s model of Jewish historical fiction would continue to serve German Jews as an archive of historical symbolism, inspiring ­resiliance, and resistance.

Figure 15. Ludwig Schwerin, illustration to Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Berlin: Schocken/Jüdischer, 1937). In this Nazi-era publication, Rabbi Abraham and Beautiful Sara contemplate a lost world from a dangerous ledge.

Jewish Memories of Inquisition and Expulsion

“Dissimilation” Under the Swastika Flag On April 25, 1934, the National Socialist newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an article entitled “On the Problem of Dissimilation.”5 Summarizing the anti-Jewish aims of the early years of the Hitler regime, the article decried German-Jewish cultural integration as a “tasteless . . . artificial . . . masquerade.” The Völkischer Beobachter defined “dissimilation” not with reference to Franz Rosenzweig, as a dynamic of Jewish cultural and spiritual distinctiveness that coexisted with Jewish acculturation and assimilation in the diaspora, but instead as a National Socialist policy aim: the removal of Jews from German society, the extirpation of Jews from German culture. The author, a Nazi propagandist by the name of Lutz Lenders, argued that this goal could not be achieved solely through legislation by the National Socialist state. Rather, it should and must be accomplished by Jews themselves, through cultural means. Lenders’s article provoked considerable reaction in the GermanJewish press, and the contentious responses illustrated the deepening fissures within the Jewish world in response to the pressure of Nazi anti-Semitism.6 In the Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau, Kurt Loewenstein refrained from directly attacking the Nazi position.7 In fact, Loewenstein’s assertion that the Zionist movement had always rejected assimilation seemed, by contrast, to be contiguous with the Völkischer Beobachter’s notion of dissimilation. Alfred Hirschberg, the editor of the liberal CV-Zeitung (a successor to the AZJ ), was outraged and reponded with a lengthy aricle.8 Predictably, Hirschberg argued that Jews sharing his newspaper’s point of view (that of “German citizens of the Jewish faith”) supported a “Jewish regeneration” that was cultural and religious, but not national; Hirschberg argued on behalf of those Jews who wished to “remain German.” Hirschberg was steadfast in articulating his objections to a National Socialist version of “dissimilation”: German-Jewish integration was no “trick,” but something that had been accomplished in the spirit of an age that was now regrettably gone. Now, in different times, German citizens of the Jewish faith would still maintain a sense of “totality of life” that could not be undone by the nationalist politics of the present. “Dissimilation,” Hirschberg asserted, could not be “projected backward” onto G ­ erman-Jewish

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history and retroactively undo the synthesis of Jewish ethics and Enlightenment ideals that an earlier generation had achieved. Yet both Zionists and integrationists had to face the same reality under National Socialism. The changed context of Jewish publishing was part of this response. Jewish writers were prohibited from publishing with “Aryan” presses or newspapers, yet Jewish publishing houses and newspapers were tolerated until November 1938. What began a century before—a German-language Jewish public sphere that fostered integration and “dissimilation” understood as the articulation of Jewish religious and cultural distinctiveness as part and parcel of modernity within the larger German society—was now a ghettoized culture. Jewish publishing survived and even flourished in Nazi Germany in the 1930s as Jewish authors grappled to make sense of their new situation, to provide consolation and guidance to their readers, and to show resistance through an allegiance to Judaism.9 Historical fiction was by no means the only genre of German-Jewish literary production in the 1930s, but it can certainly be considered as one of the most definitive. Continuing the trend from the Weimar years, historical fiction was an especially popular (if politically contested) genre both inside Nazi Germany and among exiles.10 For German-Jewish writers in the 1930s, as in the generations of Auerbach, Heine, Philippson, Lehmann, and the Weimar-era experiments of Lasker-Schüler as well, the historical novel continued to serve as a vehicle for collective memory and dissimilation as Jewish self-definition. As the brutality and ideological zeal of the Nazi movment became ever more undeniable, a cluster of fictional works set in the era of the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion appeared, beginning with Josef Kastein’s Uriel da Costa (1932). In addition to the novels of Hermann Sinsheimer (1934), Hermann Kesten (1936), and Ernst Sommer (1937), and plays such as Max Zweig’s Die Marannen (1938),11 popular works of history by Valeriu Marcu (1934) and Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer (1929 and 1936) on Sephardic Jewish history were also received as timely reflections on the present crisis. Yosef Yerushalmi has argued that these German-Jewish authors used the historical parallel with the Spanish expulsion to place the contemporary crisis of the Hitler regime’s first years in a “normative” historical framework.12 To this we can add that by revisiting and revising the sites of Jewish memory that had been so

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significant to German Jews in the nineteenth century (the Sephardic past), the Nazi-era novelists that we will examine here also transformed their understanding of the German-Jewish past as they struggled to define their own self-understanding against the new Nazi understanding of “dissimilation.”

Sephardism in the New German Ghetto: Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez Though he is scarcely known today, Hermann Sinsheimer (1883–1950) is the one writer who perhaps best represents the attempt to articulate from within the German-Jewish minority milieu a direct political and cultural response to the deep rupture in German-Jewish identity that the Nazi rise to power had caused. Before 1933, Sinsheimer had hardly been known as a “Jewish writer.” Born in a small town in southwestern Germany, Sinsheimer was a theater critic and novelist. He directed the Munich Kammerspiele for one season in 1916–17.13 Sinsheimer never denied his religious background, however, and in 1920 he published a memoir of his rural Jewish childhood in a volume he coedited with Lion Feuchtwanger.14 But Sinsheimer’s main work was in the mainstream of German liberal literary culture: he was a chief editor of Simplicissimus from 1923 to 1929 and he edited the Berliner Tageblatt’s feuilleton from 1930 until 1933. With the Nazi rise to power, however, Sinsheimer became a convinced Zionist. Banned from “German” publications, Sinsheimer worked as a journalist, writing for a number of German-Jewish newspapers with a variety of political viewpoints. Sinsheimer was active in the Kulturbund deutscher Juden, which sought to address the cultural and spiritual needs of an increasingly isolated social group, divided in its identity between Zionists and German patriots, religious and nonreligious, while Jewish communal organizations struggled to alleviate the hardships imposed by the new order and to facilitate emigration.15 Hermann Sinsheimer was one writer who sought a unique middle path in the cultural work of the Kulturbund, navigating between the Zionists, on the one hand, who were focused on emigration and Hebrew culture, and those integrationists who felt that Hitler could not and

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should not deprive them of their identity as Germans and Europeans. Sinsheimer advocated for “Jewish content” in the Kulturbund’s activities while never rejecting the German and European cultural heritage with which he himself so deeply identified. Sinsheimer’s novel Maria Nunnez: Eine jüdische Überlieferung (Maria Nunnez: A Jewish Tradition)—which he began writing immediately after the Nazi seizure of power and published in 1934 with Philo Verlag, a press affiliated with the CV-Zeitung—was the first of several works of historical fiction he composed in the context of his Jewish cultural activism in Nazi Germany.16 With Maria Nunnez, Sinsheimer revives the traditions of nineteenth-century German-Jewish Sephardism in order to pay homage to the novels of Philippson and Lehmann in a new historical moment, one where the integrationist premises under which those works had been composed had now been irreparably undermined. Sinsheimer’s novel begins in Portugal in the 1590s. Maria Nunnez Homem, a beautiful young conversa, seeks to return to the faith of her ancestors. She flees persecution in Iberia for freedom in Amsterdam together with her uncle Jacob Tirado, the poet Jacob Israel Belmonte, and several others. Their ship is seized by the British navy and the Portuguese Jews are taken to London as prisoners. A young English captain falls in love with Maria. The beautiful, exotic girl becomes an object of popular fascination. Learning of this, Queen Elizabeth I summons Maria to appear at the court. The queen offers the small group refuge in Britain, at a time when Jews had not officially been readmitted. But “shunning all the pomp of England” and rejecting her Christian suitor, Maria pleads for and wins her release, in order to help found the Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam.17 The Maria Nunnez episode had, of course, been fictionalized before, in Ludwig Philippson’s 1867 novel Jakob Tirado. Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez is a rewriting of Philippson’s tale, a tribute to this landmark of nineteenth-century German-Jewish minority culture that simultaneously exposes the radically altered conditions under which Sinsheimer and his readers now live. Jakob Tirado narrates the same legend of Maria, Queen Elizabeth, and the captain, although the focus of Philippson’s 1867 novel is on the male Jewish characters, Tirado and the poet Belmonte. The main difference between the two historical novels, however, is the gulf of Jewish historical experience that

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separates the contexts in which they were written: the 1860s, when long-sought emancipation and social integration seemed within reach; and the early 1930s, when a harmony of German and Jewish identities seemed (depending upon one’s politics) either a memory or a myth. Nowhere is the difference between the novels as pronounced as in the tone which Maria uses to ask Queen Elizabeth if she may leave England. In Ludwig Philippson’s text, Maria respectfully declines the queen’s offer to use her power to obscure “the deficiencies of her family tree,” allowing her to marry the noble non-Jewish captain.18 It would be wrong, Maria argues in Philippson’s novel, to pursue rank and status when she, “of lowly birth,” has to answer to a different calling. Her disavowal is a quiet insistence on Jewish religious distinctiveness that acknowledges her position as a social parvenu. The Maria Nunnez of 1934, by contrast, forcefully implores the queen: “This foreign soil burns the soles of my feet, this soil which cannot be a homeland, the pressure of this soil, which keeps me from acknowledging the God of my forefathers.”19 The same literary genre would now illustrate drastically changed historical relations. Philippson’s Maria is concerned with behaving according to correct social and moral codes in order to establish a role for Jewish life in the diaspora. Sinsheimer’s heroine, on the other hand, thirsts for religious and national wholeness. Maria Nunnez has adopted the contemporary nationalist rhetoric of “soil” (Boden) and “homeland” (Heimat). The Amsterdam that the Portuguese Jews want to reach is now portrayed more as a space where a free Jewish nation can flourish than as a model of European tolerance. The historical novel about Spanish Jewry—the same literary means by which German Jews sought to write themselves into German history and universal history—now becomes a medium to write themselves out of this history. Sinsheimer turns what was a potent didactic and apologist instrument in the service of integration on itself, in the name of a new Zionist politics. But rather than radically rejecting the tradition of German-Jewish minority culture, Sinsheimer’s rewriting of Philippson perpetuates the very tradition it mourns. In the German-Jewish historical novels of the nineteenth century, Sephardic Jewry served as an exemplary prototype of a Judaism well-­ integrated into its larger non-Jewish environment, yet still capable of tremendous cultural achievement. In Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob ­Tirado,

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the converted Jews (“marranos”) are in fact an allegory of those who want to remain religious Jews and simultaneously participate in modern secular society.20 Portugal represents the unenlightened old-regime “Christian state” while Amsterdam is a model of modern tolerance and prosperity, an ideal image of a Germany that does not yet exist. In Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez, by contrast, the conversos are thinly veiled stand-ins for a great many German Jews in the 1930s: steeped in the culture of the surrounding society and largely estranged from the traditions of Judaism, but nonetheless subjected to the ravages of a murderous regime which zealously sought to unmask “secret Jews.” Maria’s father is a conflicted figure. He personifies the “assimilated” Jew, but understands that his way of life is in crisis. Although he has been “Christian and Portuguese for two generations” (6), he has an ominous sense that the Jews’ fate will be his, too. Yet he cannot accept his daughter’s newfound Jewish religious fervor and fears the repressive measures of the Inquisition. In Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez, the conversos (Sinsheimer refers to them as “marranos”) are an allegory of the plight of the Jews under National Socialism: they are and feel Spanish and Christian, yet the anti-Jewish fanatics will never accept them. In this context, it is with a heavy irony that Hermann Sinsheimer turns to the tradition of the popular Jewish historical novel to address the concerns of this community. Sinsheimer’s rewriting of Philippson in Maria Nunnez reflects upon the ability and limits of its own medium—the historical narrative—to transmit historical memory. The converted Jews of Portugal have lost their connection to religion and language, but not history: “Jewish rituals had been lost because the baptized fathers had not passed them on to their children. But it was different with the passing on of the great Jewish historical past . . . to tell the children about this has become an exercise that was carried out by the Marranos with a mix of piety and routine” (10–11). Linking the converso attachment to history with his own German-language historical novel’s subtitle (Überlieferung, or “oral tradition”), Sinsheimer posits an ambivalent role for historical fabulation in shaping memory. On the one hand, it is the source from which Maria’s return is nourished, on the other hand, the “historical culture” of the assimilated Portuguese Jews is presented as an institution of the incomplete Jewish life against which the young girl rebels. Sinsheimer remarks that the

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only type of Judaism that the conversos are able to pass on is a religion elevated above all ritual, only one of “mythical power” and “historical mission” (11). Perhaps it is in this sense that Sinsheimer understood his own novel—as an appeal for Jewish solidarity on the most basic level, an idea that a secularized Jewish history could give a unified purpose to those who returned to a Jewish identity because of anti-Semitism. Just as history, in the words of Yosef Yerushalmi, could become a kind of secular “faith for fallen Jews,” in Sinsheimer’s novel and for his 1930s readers, historical fiction serves as a tie to the German-Jewish past as well as the Sephardic past. Sinsheimer’s novel inverts the integrationist agenda of Jakob Tirado. Philippson’s 1867 novel idealizes Sephardic religious rationalism for an agenda of “Sephardic supremacy” that would distinguish German Jewry from eastern European mysticism. Philippson’s Tirado, upon arrival in Amsterdam, advises the young Jews to travel to Emden to meet the Ashkenazic Rabbi Uri, who can instruct them in kabbalah, which Tirado shuns (“My spirit demands something else . . . clarity of thought!” he says). Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez, on the other hand, has a positive view of Rabbi Uri, who is called “ein Schriftgelehrter aus der Judenschaft des Ostens [an Eastern Jewish Torah scholar]” (228–29). As in Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, what was once denigrated as “irrational” by integrationist Judaism is now embraced and a new, positive appreciation of eastern European Jewry can be discerned. Maria Nunnez also perpetuates and revises the ways in which the minority genre of the popular Jewish historical novel positions itself in relation to the “high” culture of German classic drama. Where Philippson’s Jakob Tirado weds “minority” history to the master narrative of the Kulturnation by linking its hero’s story to the plot against the hated Habsburg Duke of Alba from Goethe’s Egmont (see my discussion of Jakob Tirado and Goethe in Chapter 3), Sinsheimer’s novel evokes a different intertext. The theater critic and former director could not resist hinting at a parallel with German classic drama in his own historical novel. In 1934, however, the allusion obvious to Sinsheimer is a scene from German tragedy, rather than one from German historical drama: Schiller’s Maria Stuart. Just as in Schiller’s play, the dramatic high point in Sinsheimer’s novel occurs when Queen Eliza-

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beth confronts a prisoner named Maria. In Schiller, although moving exhortations cannot secure freedom for Maria and spare her from the executioner, they establish the integrity of her character. Indeed the echo of Schiller’s words had a sad, dark, and timely resonance for German Jews: O, das ist Euer traurig finster Argwohn! Ihr habt mich stets als eine Feindin nur Und Fremdlingin betrachtet. (Schiller, Maria Stuart, act 3, scene 4) [Oh that is your sad and dark suspicion! You have always considered me as an enemy and a foreigner.]

With Schiller’s text in mind, the appearance of Maria before the queen in Sinsheimer’s novel has an ominous undertone for the German reader: her impending execution is all too foretold. Yet, in contrast to Maria Stuart, in Maria Nunnez the encounter has a happy end: Elizabeth grants Maria’s request to depart for freedom in Amsterdam. In the midst of historical catastrophe Sinsheimer’s novel fancifully twists a German tragedy into a comedy as the German-Jewish historical novel becomes a fantasy of rescue. German high culture remains a reference point for German-Jewish dissimilation even as Nazi anti-­Semitism drives Jews from Germany and denies their right to call German-­language culture their own. Sinsheimer further extends the trope of linking “popular” middlebrow German-Jewish literature to the high-culture canon, with a number of allusions to Shakespeare. This, too, is a dark reflection on its time: in an era when the Kulturbund deutscher Juden was prohibited from performing “German” works such as Schiller’s Maria ­Stuart and, for those who refused to have a “return to Jewish culture” forced upon them by Nazi regime, one of the few choices left to them was the Kultur­ bund’s productions of Shakespeare. In Maria Nunnez,­ ­Sinsheimer, who also worked on an extensive study of Shylock thro­ughout the 1930s,21 uses staples of Shakespearean comedy—mistaken identity and crossdressing—to wrest the trope of the “disguised” Jew from the arsenal of anti-Semitic rhetoric. As Sinsheimer’s Portuguese Jews sail toward Amsterdam, they are intercepted by the British navy and taken to London as (well-treated) prisoners. Maria had donned boy’s clothes for the sea voyage, yet an

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English captain, who uncannily resembles Maria’s uncle Jakob ­Tirado, falls in love with the girl, whose femininity is readily apparent. In Maria Nunnez, no one is fooled by disguises. As if conscious of the contemporary German anti-Semites who railed against Jewish integration as a “tasteless masquerade,” Sinsheimer’s novel suggests that, had they remained in Portugal, the “secret Jews” would have been “unmasked” by the Inquisition as well. Here, the message of Maria Nunnez seems in line with the pedagogical agenda of the nineteenthcentury historical novel, which used melodramatic scenes of romance to militate against exogamy and assimilation. Though Maria is attracted to the non-Jewish captain, she quickly comes to the conclusion that a genuine loving exchange is impossible, for she is, after all, his prisoner. Summoned to appear before the queen, Maria, allowed to choose from an assortment of elegant feminine apparel, chooses a simple gray dress to emphasize her true social position as a prisoner and a refugee, and celebrates a double revelation as woman and Jew. Maria pleads convincingly for her people’s liberation, and the Jews are allowed to continue on to Amsterdam, where Maria marries a cousin with the same first name as her brother. Sinsheimer’s text seems to uphold, not undermine, the bourgeois gender models of the nineteenth-century Jewish historical novel, especially as these are conflated with constructions of Judaism. Rather than invoking the “category crisis” which critic Marjorie Garber has identified as the subversive content of literary scenes of cross-dressing and pointing to a “third,” alternative identity,22 Maria Nunnez seems to infuse the strict categories of gender and religious identity which the nineteenth-century historical novel sought to establish with a new sense of urgency, in the context of the political crisis of the 1930s. By suggesting that a mere costume change will not alter the categories of “Jew” and “Christian” which the Inquisition ruthlessly seeks to separate, Sinsheimer’s novel embraces a Jewish nationalism and the subordination of sexual desire to its aims. However, the self-conscious use of the trope of cross-dressing in Maria Nunnez undermines any easy aesthetics of identification. Sinsheimer’s novel retains a critical element by refusing to invest his Zionist politics with the rhetoric of “authenticity.” Maria’s choice of clothing reveals her author’s sensitive awareness that these are existential choices of a desperate historical moment.

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Maria is given the option to remain in England with the captain and is taken for a ride in the royal carriage dressed in a fiery red gown (213). But she rejects the splendor and pageantry that a life at court would offer in favor of the masculine attire of “a little ship’s officer” (223). Sinsheimer’s text seems to acknowledge the artificiality of any costume change, but with the practical insight that the militarization of Maria gives a minority a modicum of authority in its destiny. In response to the Nazi understanding of “dissimilation”—an end to what they saw as the “tasteless masquerade” of Jewish integration—­Hermann Sinsheimer produced a novel written in the German-­language with a Zionist political tendency that showed with grace, style, and a deep appreciation of German literature and Jewish history what Alfred Hirschberg had argued: that anti-Semitism could not prevent Jews from defining themselves, from dissimilation on their own terms.

Jewish History in German Exile: Hermann Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella The revival of Sephardic themes in historical fiction published both in the increasingly persecuted Jewish milieu in Germany (Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez) and in Palestine (Max Zweig’s Die Marannen) rekindled Jewish cultural memory with a poetics that was comparable to the “minority” literature of Ludwig Philippson and Marcus Lehmann. Despite the fact that Sinsheimer and Zweig wrote in German and created historical fictions that viewed Jewish history through the prism of the German classics (thereby shaping a German-Jewish self-­understanding that aimed at “dissimilation” in the sense of a Jewish identity that always coexisted with a German one), it was self-evident that nonJewish readers took no notice (save for the Nazi Jew-­minders). It was different with German-language works published in exile. Works published in exile tended to be written by authors who had already achieved European prominence; they were often also translated into English and other languages. This literature thus implicitly addressed a “world”-wide reading public, exposing a barbaric Germany under Nazi rule and agitating for a humanist (or revolutionary) alternative. These works invite comparison with the Jewish-themed novels of

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Auerbach and Heine in terms of their literary register and audience. Yet despite their differing reading publics, in the 1930s German “exile literature” shared with German-Jewish literature a notable interest in Spanish settings. Historical novels by Bruno Frank (Cervantes; 1934), Ludwig Marcuse (Ignatius von Loyola; 1935), and Hermann Kesten (Ferdinand und Isabella; 1936) all used themes of Inquisition and religious persecution to write against National Socialism.23 Historical fiction was the literary genre par excellence of German exile literature. The experience of Hermann Kesten is an exemplary case. For a period in 1934, Kesten shared a house in Nice with Heinrich Mann and Joseph Roth.24 At the time, each of the three writers was at work on a historical novel: Heinrich Mann wrote about Henry IV, Joseph Roth about Napoleon, and Hermann Kesten about Spain’s Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella.25 Some of the definitive works of German exile literature were historical novels on Jewish themes: Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1932–43) and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Josephus trilogy (1932–42). The function of Hermann Kesten’s Sephardic-themed novel, however, is unique because it bridges Jewish “minority” cultural memory with the politics of rethinking European culture and history in response to fascism. Despite the trend for historical fiction, however, in the sharply politicized context of the 1930s the “return to history” by emigré German writers did not go unchallenged as an appropriate literary-political strategy to counter the Nazi threat. Kurt Hiller was one German radical who attacked historical novelists for their alleged “flight from the present”: We are Germans. (As much as we are proletarians or Europeans or humanists.) For us, therefore, the core problem of the day is: How to clean out the German Augean stables? . . . [Is it right] to write books about Machiavelli or Ignatius of Loyola or Moses Mendelssohn today?! There are still a few Isabellas about whom a novel has yet to be written; and Rameses IV, too, and Pippin the Middling. . . . The day after tomorrow Hitler will be emperor of Europe because today you are eagerly and cravenly fleeing from the demands of the present.26

Kurt Hiller’s tirade about the alleged political escapism of historical fiction is instructive for understanding the function of a specifically Jewish

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cultural memory as resistance to Nazism, and how it was perceived by left-wing German exiles. Notwithstanding the fact that historical parallels and analogies were an essential ingredient in antifascist literature (as, for example, the title of Konrad Heiden’s nonfictional exposé of anti-Jewish violence in Nazi Germany—The New Inquisition—makes clear),27 Kurt Hiller’s hostility to the historical novel is tinged with an agenda that had been a part of the discourse on Jewish historical fiction from its origins. The fact that a book about Moses Mendelssohn might have tremendous relevance for German Jewry in its moment of utmost crisis,28 is subordinated by Hiller, an integrationist leftist intellectual of Jewish origin, to the need to identify with the “German” opposition to fascism.29 Hiller’s rhetoric points to an understanding of the political crisis in terms which privilege “universal” collective subjects (“humanist,” “proletarian”), while at the same time conceding ground to some forms of national-ethnic “particularity” (i.e., German) and deny­ing it to others (i.e., Jewish). This understanding of Jewish history as an aporia of conflict between the “universal” and the “particular” (which formed the background both to Gutzkow’s radical assault on traditional Jewish society in Der Sadduzäer von Amsterdam and to Auer­ bach’s cautious hope for a transcendence of tradition within the context of an inclusive Enlightenment in his Spinoza) becomes conflated by Hiller with an assault on historical fiction as such. The irony, of course, is that historical novels by German-Jewish exiles, such as Lion Feuchtwanger’s Josephus trilogy, thematize the very politics that Hiller advocates, implicitly opposing all forms of nationalism in favor of an ideal of the oppositional writer as a citizen of the world.30 Hermann Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella is a different sort of novel. Like Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez, Kesten’s book is a rewriting of nineteenth-century German-Jewish Sephardism. By recalling and questioning German-Jewish self-understanding with the same historical images that Heine, Philippson, and other writers once used, Kesten’s novel is a productive literary response to this politically schematic notion of a conflict between “Jewish” and “universalist” concerns in the context of antifascist literature. Over the decades, the scholarship on exile literature—both in East Germany and in West Germany—has been colored by a political tendency to seek in this literature an alternative, antifascist cultural

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canon.31 In the 1960s and 1970s, some scholars influenced by the student movement attempted to correlate “progressive” notions of history with modernist literary form; Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella was criticized by these scholars for remaining embedded in an idea of history focused upon individual historical agents.32 But Kesten’s novel, as a revival of German and German-Jewish historical-literary symbolism, is much more complex than these critics allow. In Ferdinand und Isabella, Kesten reworks Jewish cultural memory into a critique of fascism. For German Jews, the year 1933 was an epochal calamity that invited comparison with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Fritz Heymann (1897–ca. 1943), who like Hermann Kesten was a Jewish writer in exile in Amsterdam, labored on a history of the marranos, which he presented in lecture form in 1940. For Heymann, the present crisis was a historical rupture that forced one to rethink the very structure of Jewish history: “The expulsion of the Jews from Spain marks the end of the first great period of Jewish culture in exile. The Middle Ages end here, the modern period begins . . . and this modern period came to an end in 1933.”33 Heymann, conscious of the symbolic weight of the image of Sephardic “glory and greatness” that was popularized above all through the Jewish Ritterromantik from Heine through Sinsheimer, sought to present a historical portrait to an audience for whom the contemporary resonance would have been apparent. For some leftist critics, however, historical parallels in popular literary representations like Kesten’s could not rise above the level of historical “mythologization” so long as they remained wedded to a nineteenthcentury aesthetic focused on individual historical agents, said to reductively attribute the specificity of dictatorial terror to timeless human factors.34 Yet Kesten, who like Fritz Heymann was part of a circle of German emigrés in Amsterdam,35 chooses Spain and the Inquisition as the setting for his historical novel in order to draw upon a deep tradition of historical-literary symbolism that saw “medieval” Spain as the defining antithesis of the German Enlightenment. Far from “mythologizing” the fascist police state and its persecutions of Jews and heretics, by inscribing his fictional Jewish history within the literary tradition of such works as Goethe’s Egmont and Heine’s ­Almansor, Kesten integrates his antifascist politics within the discourse of Enlightenment and German-Jewish liberalism.36

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To be sure, Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella is a traditional narrative: the main characters are the Catholic monarchs and the court Jew and perennial hero of German-Jewish historical fiction from Heine through Philippson, Reckendorf and Nossig: Don Isaac Abravanel. Ferdinand und Isabella fluctuates between long personalized dialogues and reflections by the traditional omniscient narratorial voice of nineteenth-century fiction. Yet the focus in Kesten’s novel on the dictatorial monarchs as individuals is more than a “psychologizing” of history: it is a vehicle for political satire. For Kesten’s traditional historical novel unmasks the ideology of the Inquisition as rooted in the base economic opportunism of the reactionary monarchs and their minions. Kesten’s presentation can be mocking, as in his summary of the Inquisition’s edict on how to recognize heretics: 1. If a baptized Jew says that the Messiah has not yet arrived! . . . 4. If one is wearing a clean shirt on the Sabbath or has no fire in the oven. . . . 16. If he chants the Psalms. . . . 18. Whoever circumcises his son. . . . 28. If one is rich. 29. If he has property. 30. If he has two enemies who denounce him . . . Thus can the competition be eliminated. 31. If one is rich. 32.–99. If one is rich. 100. If one has money and is rich.37

And Kesten’s tone can also be mournful, as in the description of the torture chambers of the Inquisition: In the wide underground chambers of the Dominican monastery St. Pablo the prisoners of the Inquisition were gathered, young and old, women, . . . a splendid collection. There were only Christians, most of them rich, the best citizens of Seville. Old Christians and New Christians lay upon rotten straw and bare stones. . . . They crowded together, every day more arrived. . . . None were told what they were accused of. None saw any witness, nor learned the name of their accuser, nor received a lawyer. . . . They were led to the torture chambers in groups. Those who remained behind heard the most frightful screams through all of the walls. They began to speak loudly, to sing, to wail, in order not to hear the screams. Many stuffed their ears with their fists. (198)

The narrative focus in Ferdinand und Isabella is on the inner thoughts of Queen Isabella. But it reveals not the caprice of individual power

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and its ascription to “timeless” and “general” psychological motivation, but is instead a biting portrait of the fateful intertwining of economic desperation and the fanatical fulfillment of an evil ideology in the service of a dictator’s dreams of conquest: In anxious haste, she turned to new saints and asked: Do I do wrong? Does God love my deeds? My sins multiply. Does God love me? The queen closed her eyes. She swore to drive the Jews from Spain once Granada fell. The monk Torquemada was always imploring her to do so. As long as the war lasted, she needed the Jews. The Jews financed the war. This year, she had levied a considerable tax on them. She had pawned all of her jewels, her family silver, and Ferdinand’s bridal gift, the ruby necklace, to rich Jews from Valencia and Barcelona. Isabella decided to burn even more heretics. (298–99)

Kesten’s individuals have a representative function. Thus, his Don Isaac Abarbanel can function as a vehicle for a critique of Jewish responses to the crisis of 1933. So long as Kesten’s Isabella needs to finance her war against the Muslims, the reach of the Inquisition is limited to baptized Jews and those Christians suspected of heresy. At first, perhaps symbolic of some overconfident German Jews who believed that Hitler’s true targets were only the communists or perhaps the eastern European Jews, Kesten’s Abarbanel believes that his well-established position will secure himself and his fellow Jews. At a meeting of Jewish elders Abarbanel declares: “But Mendoza, the chancellor, the honored cardinal explained to me the Inquisition is not concerned with Jews but only with heretics, Christians, baptized Jews, renegades” (149). But in Kesten’s novel, Abarbanel is transformed. His Jewish ethics lead him to feel solidarity with the victims of the Inquisition: That is the truth. Ever since the Christians ruled one half of the world and the Moslems ruled the other half, cross and crescent battle for converts with the sword, the freedom of the spirit has fled to us Jews. We only wish to use our teachings, our words, to use only sacred reason to sway beliefs. We were destined to become a nation of priests, not one of hangmen, butchers, soldiers and firebrands. . . . It is unexcusable to be in possession of the truth and to cast it away for a lesser good. . . . We want to aid our lost brothers. (530–31)

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The liberal principles articulated by Kesten’s Abravanel in the passage cited above affirm the former and extend the project of the nineteenthcentury German-Jewish historical novel. Later, when the edict expelling all Jews from Spain is issued, Kesten’s text relies on a traditional aesthetics of Mitleid to imagine collective feelings of compassion on the part of the non-Jewish bystanders and to inspire in the reader revulsion over the persecution: On every road in Spain, the Jews fled by horse, by mule, but most on foot. Old men dragged themselves along, women carried children, men carried all that they could save from their household. . . . [All] wept loudly for hunger and weariness. The sick groaned in the dust of the wayside, the old men in the heat of the sun. The Spanish peasants stood by the roadside in silent contemplation of the misery of the Jews and were made sorrowful. Anxiously they crossed themselves. They shed tears and turned away, fearful in their hearts of those who pleaded for bread and water. But their fear of Torquemada was stronger than their pity. (325–26)

If Kesten’s descriptions of the “false” collective of cowardice created by the terror of a dictatorial system seem to suggest a pessimistic resignation of politics in a moment of historical crisis, one might also note that they may have seemed to the contemporary reader an adequate description of the status quo: [Torquemada] published a new edict and gave those who had been denounced two months’ time. The edict was posted on all doors, read from every pulpit . . . , from everywhere the fearful Marranos came, thousands of them, they denounced themselves, their wives, their children, their parents, ancestors, friends, enemies, names, names and more names, from Seville, Cordova, Cadix, Madrid. (243–44; my trans.)

In contrast to the crowds which seem powerless to act against the terror of the Inquisition, Kesten’s court Jew Don Isaac Abravanel shows tremendous courage. Ninety-nine years after Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marranen helped launch the genre of the German-Jewish historical novel with his fictionalized presentation of Abravanel’s apology for the Jews of Spain, Kesten’s 1936 novel once again confronts the face of power with the rhetorical force of the court Jew Abravanel. In Kesten’s

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Ferdinand und Isabella, however, Abravanel’s speech before the Spanish monarchs has a decidedly different tone: “Abravanel,” called Ferdinand, “Were you always a banker?” “I began as a scholar, Your Majesty.” Disappointed, Ferdinand asked, “Are you still a Jew, at least? Or have you been baptized, too?” “Your majesty,” answered Abravanel mockingly, “Spain needs Jews.” “Why?” asked Ferdinand. “Without us, our countrymen might think that their misfortune was not the fault of Jews, but rather of the kings.” “Our countrymen, Jew?” “I am a Spaniard,” Don Isaac responded proudly, “since Roman times. We Abravanels remember when there weren’t any Christians at all. The Jewish cemeteries are the oldest in Spain.” “You Jews are so old,” said Ferdinand, “And nobody finished you off yet?” (626)

In contrast to Phöbus Philippson’s accommodating, apologetic image of Abravanel, Kesten’s Don Isaac bravely reveals his anger. In so d ­ oing, Kesten’s Abarbanel laconically employs the arguments of German-­ Jewish integrationists, although he knows that at this point they serve more to console Jews rather than to sway anti-Semites. He is convinced that dictators cannot last long without scapegoats. Perhaps he harbors the hope that a return might one day be possible. But as he realizes that neither eloquent speeches nor bribes can change the impending reality of exile, Kesten’s Abravanel turns inward: “Laugh, you mighty ones, laugh! thought the pious Jew. You laugh as long as God is silent. For whoever would raise their voice to speak . . . ach, thought Don Isaac: Who is as silent as Thou, o God? You look on and remain silent” (699). Kesten’s Ferdinand and Isabella is a revival of German-Jewish cultural memory that addresses a double audience. To the Jewish reader, the recollection of the literary tradition of Philippson’s Die Marrannen is a painful reminder that the new expulsion has already begun, that the new historical reality has inverted the hopes of a previous generation’s Jewish historical fiction, and that the Jew’s position seems increasingly helpless. The indifference from heaven which Don Isaac senses reinforces a sense of secular, social isolation. For the G ­ erman exile commu-

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nity and the wider anti-Nazi readership throughout the world whom Kesten hopes to rally with his novel, the saga of Jewish persecution in the fifteenth century is a call to action in the present. Ironically, if Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen puts the non-Jewish German reader in the position of the Spanish monarchs, weighing Don Isaac’s rational arguments for acceptance and tolerance, then Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella begs even more of the non-Jewish reader: only a secular ­miracle—resolute political action against National Socialism—or an equally miraculous liberalization of immigration policies in the midst of the Great Depression—can now save the Jews from the force of history.

Political Conversions: Ernst Sommer’s Botschaft aus Granada The title of Ernst Sommer’s 1937 novel resounds like a poster or a newsreel from the Spanish Civil War: Botschaft aus Granada (Message from Granada). As weapons and troops from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy aided the nationalist putsch and left-wing advisors and volunteers reinforced the republican forces, the conflict in Spain became internationalized, a showdown between fascist and antifascist causes. Although racist anti-Semitism was not a primary element in Spanish fascism, Franco and his propagandists railed against “Judeo-Masonic conspiracies”; Spanish history, too, was mobilized by the fascists, with the expulsion of 1492 glorified as a “solution to the Jewish Question.”38 Back in Hitler’s Germany, two different playwrights composed historical dramas about Queen Isabella, in which National Socialist rhetoric thundered anachronistically from the stage, with proto-Nazi characters swearing that death for Spain, their Vaterland, is preferable to Judenhandel (“doing business with Jews”).39 In this increasingly menacing context, Ernst Sommer’s Botschaft aus Granada appeared as a work of historical fiction which intervenes in the crisis of the 1930s. Sommer’s theme is the meaning of Jewish identity in a time of persecution, and he responds to anti-Semitism with a revival of German-Jewish Sephardism, to militate for a strengthened notion of Jewish commitment. Ernst Sommer (1888–1955) had a few things in common with Franz Kafka: he was affiliated with the “Prague circle” of German-language Jewish literati; he was trained as a lawyer; and he also worked full-time,

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writing on the side.40 Based in Karlsbad from 1920 until his emigration to Britain in 1939, Sommer was a Social Democrat and active in local government work and politics. His early novel Gideons Auszug (­Gideon’s Exodus; 1913) dealt with the crisis of conscience young western European Jews had in response to Zionism and their encounter with eastern European Jews.41 With the rise of National Socialism, Sommer was yet another writer who turned to historical fiction to comment upon his own times. In 1935, his novel about the Templars and their persecution by the Inquisition could still be published in Berlin, as its historical symbolism was perhaps too esoteric to attract the interest of Nazi censors.42 Botschaft aus Granada was Ernst Sommer’s second historical novel.43 Banned in Nazi Germany, it was printed in Czechoslovakia.44 The ban doesn’t seem to have been consistently enforced, however. The 1937 edition was reviewed in the German-Jewish press,45 and in 1938 the Berlin Jewish publisher Jüdische Buchvereinigung was able to publish an edition under license but the distribution was severely restricted when the permission to publish was rescinded and the ban reimposed; the Jüdische Buchvereinigung was soon thereafter forced into bankruptcy.46 The German exile press in Paris published an excerpt, “Die Folterung” (The Torture) in October 1937.47 Botschaft aus Granada is structured in chapters named after the main individual figures, with a final chapter entitled “Das Volk” (The People). The story of the Christian conquest of Granada and the persecution and expulsion of Jews, Muslims, and heretics is told through the prism of leading historical figures and ordinary, anonymous Spanish Jews. Some of these nameless representatives of the Jewish masses are introduced in their interactions with the towering figures of Sephardic history, others are aboard a ship of expellees which departs from Barcelona in the final chapter. Like Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella, Botschaft aus Granada has an episodic structure with a focus on decisive individuals (Abraham Senior, Torquemada, Columbus, and of course Isaac Abravanel all figure prominently). Unlike the palpably satirical tone of Ferdinand und ­Isabella, however, Ernst Sommer’s tone in Botschaft aus Granada is plain, even serious, and reminiscent of familiar historical adventure novels. As Gerhard Langer has recently shown, Botschaft aus Granada is built around the contrasting commitment to Judaism that the major

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Sephardic characters display.48 Abraham Senior’s decision to convert to Christianity in order to remain in Spain and to protect his family (above all their social position) is portrayed as a reprehensible act of bad faith done for questionable material gain: as he is baptized in a stately ceremony under the sponsorship of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Sommer has Senior inwardly identify cynically with Judas. By contrast, a pointed exchange between Luis de Santangel, a converted Jew who financed Columbus’s travels, and Don Isaac Abravanel illustrates two other possible life choices for those who face persecution for their Jewish origins. Santangel is a Christian, close to Queen Isabella, who in the past has had strained relations with Don Isaac, openly and proudly Jewish. Although Santangel is not yet persecuted, his “alien blood” is sensed by Isabella.49 When Santangel begins to show a more fraternal attitude toward Abravanel, the latter asks him pointedly, “Are you one of us?” Santangel does not answer. Sommer does not portray Santangel’s assimilation as an act of opportunism, as he does with Senior’s conversion. The fact that a racist concern with “Jewish blood” will make Santangel’s position untenable does not delegitimize his identity. Don Isaac Abravanel’s allegiance to Judaism seems to mirror Santangel’s SpanishChristian assimilation, but the two figures seem to speak past each other. Clearly a legacy of his Social Democratic politics and his early interest in Zionism, Sommer’s novel is distinguished by its concern with the Jews as a community and with the nameless Jews and converts impacted by the expulsion and the Inquisition. The rabbis in Botschaft aus Granada—Saadia ben Maimun of Granada, Ibn Danan, and Abravanel—make clear their concern for Jews and converts alike; they grant wide latitude in understanding them as “Anussim” (Jews forced to convert). In his portraits of ordinary Jews and converts, Sommer tends to glorify them as courageous, even fearless embodiments of resistance. In the chapter entitled “Torquemada,” women and children affirm their Jewish identity when confronted with the Grand Inquisitor himself. And Benito Garcia, a converso accused of host desecration and tortured for weeks by the Inquisition, boldly defies the tribunal: “I have learned that a baptized Jew is a deformed creature, rejected by men and by God. But the true antichrists are the Inquisitors. And the great Antichrist himself is none other than the old man whom you call Torquemada.”

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The members of the tribunal rose . . . “You have tortured me for weeks for the sake of the body of Christ!” screamed Garcia, foaming at the mouth. “But even if you burn me to ashes this instant I cannot say that it is anything but a mixture of flour and water . . . ” “I am a Jew and know but one law—” (203)

The brutal nature of the Inquisition and its torture regime is stressed in Sommer’s novel, as the author transforms the portrayal of the Sephardic past to spotlight heroism and resistance to fascism. (It is a theme that Sommer would develop later [1944] in his novel Revolte der Heiligen, one of the first literary portrayals of the Holocaust.)50 Indeed, a 1938 review of Botschaft aus Granada in a German exile journal emphasized this point as the most timely message of Sommer’s novel, calling it a “prophetic morality” in response to persecution. The author of the review, Robert Breuer, quotes a passage where Rabbi Saadia of Granada says of Torquemada, “He made the Jews poor. Poor people are tenacious. He made the Jews despised. Despised people are brave. Only people with something to lose are cowardly and weak.”51 Like Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella, these lines from Sommer’s novel interpret the Sephardic past for both Jewish and non-Jewish readers. The tone of revolutionary solidarity shows here an affinity with a leftist aesthetic of resistance (indeed, Sommer’s works were later very well received in East Germany), and Spanish-Jewish history becomes a symbol for the general German antifascist cause. On the other hand, the message of Jewish solidarity and the focus on Don Isaac Abravanel is a continuation of the tradition of German-Jewish Sephardism that Heine, Philippson, and others had inaugurated. Not surprisingly, it was Hermann Sinsheimer, the author of Maria Nunnez, who reviewed Sommer’s Botschaft aus Granada for the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau. Sinsheimer’s review applauds the idea of highlighting the narrative of “the people” as the main lesson of the expulsion of 1492, but he evaluates Sommer’s attempt as inadequate.52 Where Sinsheimer would have liked to see the saga of Spanish-Jewish emigration and communal survival painted as an epic tableau, a parallel for the contemporary German-Jewish response to crisis, he finds Sommer’s representative characters too small a sample to achieve this effect.

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Three years after he published his own Sephardic novel, the mass exodus needed to rescue German Jewry seems to call for a grander effort. Sinsheimer draws further conclusions about the legacy of 1492 for the 1930s: Sommer’s novel (and Sinsheimer praises his historical accuracy) makes clear, notes Sinsheimer, that Spanish Jewry had no real leadership in this period. Sinsheimer argues that the failure of Sephardic elites is visible not only in the conversion of Abraham Senior but also in the emigration of Isaac Abravanel, who was mostly concerned to save his own family and privileged circle, fleeing from one court to another. Sephardism as collective memory, implied Sinsheimer, should now inspire a concern with the collective Jewish fate.

Don Isaac Abravanel’s Last Days in Berlin Hermann Sinsheimer’s critical perspective on Don Isaac Abravanel was a rare moment of dissonance in the midst of a celebration that was already underway. The year 1937 marked Abravanel’s five hundredth birthday. Following up on the Maimonides anniversary year in 1935, the Abravanel quincentennial was another opportunity for German Jews to address the central themes of German-Jewish Sephardism— the meaning of Jewish religion and culture within a non-Jewish society, the positive symbolism of the convivencia alongside the negative historical memory of Inquisition and expulsion—within the context of their current crisis under National Socialism.53 It was Alfred Klee of the Preußischer Landesverband jüdischer ­Gemeinden (the umbrella organization of Jewish communities in Prussia, which covered about two thirds of all Jews in Germany) who issued the call on January 27, 1937, to celebrate the legacy of ­Abravanel that year.54 Klee invited Jews in Germany to recall Abravanel, not only as a religious figure and theologian, but as an effective human being and a great moral character. A commemorative medal (Figure 16) was struck and awarded to Heinrich Stahl, the chairman of the Berlin Jewish Community. An accompanying dedication from Rabbi M ­ artin ­Salomonski made clear the parallels to be drawn: “In very difficult times, Abravanel stood at the head of his community, because he was the most worthy. Courageous and self-sacrificing, he was a man of

Jewish Memories of Inquisition and Expulsion

Figure 16. Commemorative medal featuring Don Isaac Abravanel, issued by the Berlin Jewish Community, 1937. Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, Don Isaac Abravanel Collection, LBI Archives AR 2498.

deeds who applied his talents to not only represent the Jews, but also to successfully guide their wanderings as they finally had to leave Spain and Portugal. A similar task has fallen to you.”55 Both Salomonski and Stahl would perish in German concentration camps rather than surviving to lead their communities in new locations, but both had worked tirelessly to advance Jewish emigration and to aid those stuck in Nazi Germany. Abravanel’s legacy for German Jewry was viewed as very much in the spirit of the rabbis whom Ernst Sommer had portrayed in his novel, as a model of Jewish communal solidarity and service in the face of anti-Jewish persecution. The high point of the 1937 Abravanel commemoration in Germany was an exhibit which opened on June 13 in the Berlin Jewish Museum. Housed next to the monumental Moorish-style Neue Synagogue, the original museum had only officially opened its doors at Oranienburger­ straße 31 in the fateful year of 1933 (though it grew out a collection which had been assembled since 1917). The early history of the Berlin Jewish Museum—which lasted until the National Socialists ordered it closed in the wake of the pogrom of November 9, 1938—is thus almost entirely bound up with the question of German-Jewish cultural perseverance and resistance. As James Young notes, “It is almost as if

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the museum had hoped to establish the institutional fact of an inextricably linked German-Jewish culture, each a permutation of the other, as a kind of challenge to the Nazis’ assumption of an essential hostility between German and Jewish cultures.”56 Yet the Berlin Jewish Museum’s most extensive exhibition in these dark years, curated by Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, was devoted not to German-Jewish history but to Don Isaac Abravanel, the Sephardic court Jew and religious authority. The museum had previously highlighted German-Jewish subjects. The 1937 Abravanel exhibit was preceded by a 1936 exhibit on GermanJewish family history entitled “Unsere Ahnen,”57 and it was followed by an exhibit devoted to the early nineteenth-century Ashkenazic rabbinic authority Akiva Eger. But neither exhibit matched the ambition of the Abravanel event, which included some 123 books, paintings, drawings, medals, and other objets d’art, including many loaned from museums abroad.58 On one level, the Abravanel exhibit was the swan song of a tradition of German-Jewish Sephardism dating back to Heine. On another level, the exhibit was a positive form of Jewish dissimilation, subtly critiquing Nazi-era cultural practices. The year 1937 was ominous for the German museum: in July 1937 in Munich the infamous “Entartete Kunst” exhibit opened in the Hofgarten, a pendant show to the “Erste Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung” (First Great German Art Exposition). The Abravanel exhibit was a counternarrative to these contemporary events. Unlike the Nazi art shows, which paradoxically used modernist exhibition strategies to attack modernist art,59 the Jewish Museum exhibit had a conventional title: “Gedenkausstellung Don Jizchaq Abravanel: Seine Welt, Sein Werk.” Yet while centered on one remarkable individual and his age, the works assembled create a more complex web of connections. On the one hand, Abravanel’s religious and philosophical writings—in Hebrew and in Latin translation—were displayed alongside paintings and portraits that connect him with his times: an engraved image of King Alfonso V of Portugal, portraits of Vasco da Gama, Cesare Borgia, and Italian and Spanish aristocrats. The exhibition devoted space to Abravanel’s multiple roles: as a participant in the political life of the court in Portugal and Spain, as a religious commentator and exegete of messianic longings while in Italy after 1492, and as the father of Jehuda Abravanal, better known as

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Leone Ebreo, the Renaissance philosopher whose Neoplatonic treatise “Dialogues of Love” put him in the company of Marsilio Ficino and others. While these objects give a conventional portrayal of life, works, and environment, they also send a powerful message of an ideal of Jewish cultural integration into all spheres of life, a stark contrast to increasingly narrow possibilities for Jews in Germany. Simultaneously, the authorship and provenance of these objects serve to remind the audience that the link of Jewish culture to European culture is genuine and historically grounded: a portrait of Isabella d’Este by Titian, on loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, is accompanied by an explanation that this Italian duchess had a Jewish tutor. Another Titian painting, lent by Madrid’s Prado museum, depicts a Venetian senator; a marble sculpture of a fifteenth-century Italian doctor, by Rossellino, was loaned by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The curator’s notes explain to the viewer that Abravanel met with such figures in his capacity as a court advisor and that Italian Jews could study and practice medicine, but beyond establishing the historical context, they offer German Jews living under National Socialism a link with a world of European culture not yet closed to them. The Abravanel exhibition even included a Rembrandt sketch of Menasse ben Israel, from 1636, especially significant given the attempts of art historians like Julius Langbehn and his National Socialist inheritors to cast Rembrandt as somehow essentially Nordic and anti-Semitic. In contrast to the 1937 exhibitions organized by the National Socialists which established sharp boundaries between “German” and “Jewish,” “acceptable” and “unacceptable” art—the Berlin Jewish Museum’s Abravanel exhibit displays works from Europe’s prominent museums alongside Jewish religious texts to establish connections across time with a legacy of Renaissance culture and links across space to show how intertwined Jewish history is with European culture. Finally, the Abravanel exhibition demonstrates a thoughtful strategy in its relation to the exhibition space. For the Berlin Jewish Museum was housed alongside the Moorish-style Neue Synagogue, built in the 1850s in emulation of the classic architecture of Muslim Spain. The presentation of the life of Abravanel, this central historical figure who not only embodied the cultural accomplishment of Sephardic Jewry but also its survival of Inquisition and exile, serves to mobilize the

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symbolism of this prominent Berlin building. If to optimistic Jewish integrationists in mid-nineteenth century Germany, the fruitful co­ existence of Jewish and Muslim culture in medieval Spain served as an ideal for the future, now in dark times, the specter of a new inquisition and expulsion erased the boundaries between the material presented within the museum space and the reality outside it. As part of the “Abravanel year,” a number of scholarly and popular works assessing his historical, theological, and philosophical contributions were published in Germany as well as in exile, making reference to the historical analogy between the dilemma facing the many Jews in Nazi Germany and the Inquisition and expulsion from Iberia. Ismar Elbogen, Leo Strauss, and Selig Schachnowitz were some of many Jews across the religious and political spectrum who wrote essays and books on Don Isaac.60 In one study, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–72) noted the sense of foreboding evoked by the anniversary, remarking that “the shimmer of autumn glows around Abarbanel”; he “served states from which he had to flee, acquired wealth that was confiscated,” and his appeal to King Ferdinand was a tragic failure.61 But the desperate Spanish Jews could not see, according to Heschel, that their exile simultaneously meant freedom from a role in the murderous enterprise of Spanish colonialism (Heschel mentions that over a million perished when the conquistadores arrived), which turned out to be an unexpected blessing. Heschel’s interpretation of Abarbanel’s legacy was in keeping with the traditions of German-Jewish Sephardism, a reinterpretation of the past for present needs, here a message to readers regarding the vicious nature of the Nazi regime. Using the vocabulary of a GermanJewish tradition stretching back to Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach, it is fitting that a “Rabbi Abraham” was one of those who recognized that this generation would regrettably write its final chapters. Meanwhile, German anti-Semites were also attuned to the new discussions of Isaac Abravanel’s legacy that were occasioned by the 1937 Berlin exhibition, and Nazi thinkers advanced their own perverse interpretations of Abravanel. In his 1942 work Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Land and Sea: An Observation of World History), Carl Schmitt cites Abravanel’s messianic vision of the “feast of Leviathan” as an illustration of a supposed Jewish plan to deviously gain power by waiting on the sidelines of cataclysmic battles.62 Anselm

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Figure 17. Anselm Kiefer, Isaac Abravanel: Das Gastmahl des Levithan (Isaac Abravanel: The Feast of Leviathan; 2004). Oil, emulsion, and acrylic on canvas with lead boats. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy White Cube.

Kiefer’s recent painting Isaac Abravanel: The Feast of Leviathan (2004) references Carl Schmitt’s book with haunting images of destruction and violence that reflect solemnly and sorrowfully upon the horrors of German militarism and anti-Semitism (Figure 17). (The painting also invites associations of apocalyptic nuclear or environmental scenarios where military submarines are the final lonely survivors). The painting is a seascape with rusting lead submarines and gunboats mounted on the canvas, and Kiefer’s mix of ghostly white and glaring orange seems to quote from J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840). Kiefer’s painting is a mournful invocation of Isaac Abravanel that responds to the destruction of German Jewry in the Holocaust.

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The 1937 Abravanel exhibit in Berlin was a self-conscious endpoint for a century-old tradition of German-Jewish Sephardism. Curiously, the German historical novels and dramas in which Isaac Abravanel appeared—Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (begun in the 1820s), Philippson’s Die Marannen (1837), Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden (1856–57), Nossig’s Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes (1906), Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella (1936), and Sommer’s Botschaft aus Granada (1937)—are not mentioned in the exhibition catalog. In a letter to Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein, the curator of the exhibit, the ­German-born Dutch-Jewish historian Sigmund Seeligmann questioned why the exhibit did not also include aspects of the modern interest in Abravanel.1 Kesten and Sommer’s works were of course banned in Nazi Germany and could certainly not be mentioned, but perhaps the meaning of the Abravanel legacy for modern German Jews was so self-evident that it did not need to be explicitly referenced. Nowhere is the continuity clearer that in a handwritten dedication in the copy of Heschel’s 1937 Abravanel study which is preserved in the library of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York: “Nicht zurück soll euer Adel schauen, sondern hinaus! Nicht woher ihr kommt mache euch fürderhin eure Ehre, sondern wohin ihr geht!” In diesen Linien werden Enkel zum Ahnen werden! Und so strebt die Nachfahrin des großen Gelehrten Abarbanell in eigener und ihrer Kinder Erziehung. (Berlin 1938. Regine Marcus, deren Mutter noch den Namen Abarbanell trug) [“Your nobility looks not backward, but forward! It is not your origin that brings you honor, but your destination!” Through these lines,

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descendants will become ancestors! And thus the descendant of the great scholar Abarbanell strives in her own education and in the education of her children. (Berlin 1938. Regine Marcus, whose mother still bore the name Abarbanell)]

This dedication, written by an ordinary woman, casts light on the purpose the fictional Abravanels from Heine through Sommer served for German Jews for over a century. They were not mere historical memorials, but rather were living testaments that looked toward the present and the future. These fictionalized pasts were themselves part of the historical process, for their message was not one of comfort and pride in a noble past but of courage and probity in facing what lay ahead, imploring the present generation to see themselves not as the last, but as the next. What became of Regine Marcus, the woman who wrote this dedication? In a two-volume memorial book containing the names of Berlin Jews who were deported to death camps, there are listed two women named “Regine Marcus.”2 Several people who still bore the name Abarbanel (or “Abarbanell,” as her family spelled it) are listed, too. The destruction of European Jewish life and culture also meant the death of the fictional Abarbanels. Perhaps this is the meaning of the epilogue to Leo Perutz’s novel Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke (By Night Under the Stone Bridge), first published in 1953.3 In the epilogue to Perutz’s historical novel, set in sixteenth-century Prague, the narrator is revealed to be Perutz’s own tutor in turn-of-the-century Prague. After having told the young Perutz the story of the famous fortune of financier Mordechai Meisel (an ancestor of the narrator), the narrator shows the author Meisel’s last will and testament. The fortune had been lost: Meisel divides his remaining possessions, a collection of books, among his relatives. An ancestor of the narrator inherits four books by Don Isaac Abravanel. These, the reader is told, have been lost over the years. The narrator then turns to the recently “sanitized” Prague ghetto, pointing out all the buildings which no longer exist. In the post-Holocaust historical novel, the figure of Abarbanel is connected to images of irretrievable loss. After 1945, Perutz’s story seems to say, there are no more German-language Abarbanel stories, and any fictional Jewish history must have the destruction of European Jewry as its permanent point of reference.

Post-Holocaust Echoes

Perutz (1882–1957) labored intermittently on his historical novel, originally titled “Meisels Gut” (Meisel’s Estate), for twenty-seven years. The first chapter was completed in 1924, and the project left unfinished until Perutz found himself in exile in Palestine after 1938. He worked intensively on the manuscript from March 1943 through April 1945. Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke is a series of interrelated novellas. The first section, “Die Pest in der Judenstadt” (The Plague in the Jewish Quarter), focuses on two comic figures who conjure up the ghetto episode in Heine’s seminal Jewish historical novel Der Rabbi von ­Bacherach: “In autumn 1589, as children were dying in great numbers in Prague’s Jewish quarter, two poor entertainers, old men who earned their living by amusing guests at weddings, walked down the Bellesgasse, a small street that led from Nicolasplatz to the cemetery.”4 In contrast to the ambivalence of historical symbolism in H ­ eine’s Rabbi of Bacherach, history’s horrible trajectory seems legible in almost every detail in Perutz’s post-Holocaust German-Jewish historical novel. ­Unlike Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, which ends on a dissonant chord of danger, threat, crisis, and even perhaps hope, Perutz’s novel strikes melancholy notes at every turn. The German-Jewish historical novel did not “end” with the publication of Leo Perutz’s Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke. Works of Jewish historical fiction would continue to appear, but, like Perutz’s novel, they evoke the reality of the devastation and the loss of the audience for which they might once have been written. These novels could reflect quite differently on the past and on the relation between historiography and historical fiction, but most would turn to times of plague and massacre as their setting, marking them as “baroque” reflections on a destroyed world. For the historian Selma Stern, historical fiction was the only possible engagement with the past in a period of radical rupture. In an afterword to her series of novellas set in fourteenthcentury Germany, she writes: This “historical” novella-cycle set in the years of the “Black Death” was composed in the years 1942–44, begun a few months after my husband and I emigrated to the United States. After the unsettling experiences we had in the “Third Reich” it was no longer possible for me to continue with my scholarly, historical work. Nor was I prepared to deal objectively with the rapid upheaval of the present and integrate

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that into my historical world-view. In this depressing and inescapable situation I immersed myself in the chronicles, literary testimonies and holy books of a long-vanished epoch, one in which German Jewry faced incomprehensible and destructive powers similar to those that my generation faced. . . . As I tried to internally experience the powerful, tragic events of that era I began to grasp what gave these medieval Jews the power to withstand with bravery the calamity that was their fate, to suffer their violent death with a sense of joy and faith.5

If Selma Stern could find a source of solace in the accounts of martyrdom recorded in ancient chronicles, in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Spanische Ballade (published as Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo),6 the chronicle stands for the inability of historical fiction to poetically transform historical horror. Spanische Ballade is Feuchtwanger’s post-­ Holocaust return to a Jewish subject for a historical novel. In this novel, Feuchtwanger, who had criticized the “trivial” Jewish novels of writers like Philippson and Lehmann in his dissertation on Heine’s Rabbi, now takes up the Sephardic theme that all of these writers had cultivated.7 The tension between history and fiction is foreshadowed in the contrast between the citations which precede the narration: Der König verliebte sich heftig in eine Jüdin, die den Namen Fermosa, die Schöne, trug, und er vergaß sein Weib. (Alfonso el Sabio, Cronica General, ca. 1270) [The King became passionately enamored with a Jewess by the name of Fermosa, meaning “the Beautiful,” and he forgot his wife.] Nach Toledo ging Alfonso Mit der Königin, der jungen, Schönen. Aber Liebe blendet, Und er täuschte sich durch Liebe Und verschaute sich in eine Jüdin, und sie hieß Fermosa. Ja, Fermosa hieß “die Schöne” Hieß sie, und sie hieß zu Recht so. Und mit ihr vergaß der König Seine Königin. (Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, Die Liebeshändel Alfonsos des Achten mit der schönen Jüdin, 1551)

Post-Holocaust Echoes

[To Toledo went Alfonso with his queen, so young and beautiful. Yes, but love can make one blind, and in love he was deluded. Fell he did for a Jewish woman, and her name it was Fermosa. Fermosa—she was called “the beauty”—and this name was rightly given. And with her forgot the queen.]8

The Romantic tenor of Lorenzo de Sepúlveda sets the tone for most of Feuchtwanger’s tale. With its sovereign narrator, it is governed by the conventions of what critic Hans Vilmar Geppert terms the “usual” historical novel.9 The stress on a split between fiction and history, evident in the parallel quotations above (which preface each of the novel’s three sections), becomes visible only in the seventh chapter of the first section. There, when the narrator comes to the subject of the Crusades and the massacres of the Jewish communities of Speyer, Trier, and Mainz, he quotes from medieval Jewish chronicles and martyrologies. Feuchtwanger’s narrator—although he does not reflect on his reasons for doing so—refuses to continue the narrative’s Romantic tone and thereby aestheticize wholesale slaughter. Violence is depicted elsewhere in Feuchtwanger’s narrative: the murder of the heroine and her father are, unlike the massacres, narrated. Other historical chronicles appear, too. The court chronicler Rodrigue, who despairs about the meaninglessness of history and of his own role in producing this meaning, thematizes the problems of representation with which the text wrestles. The narrator’s recourse to chronicles in his relation of the massacres by the crusaders is of a different sort. Here the narrator attempts to minimize his role to a “zero degree,” not to produce a “reality effect,” but to set a boundary for narration. Feuchtwanger’s Spanische Ballade points to a breakdown in representation, an aesthetic-moral acknowledgment that historical fiction could no longer proceed in the same way. In Hebrew translation, German-Jewish historical novels remained popular through the 1940s, above all as a youth genre. The works of Reckendorf/Friedberg and Lehmann were reprinted (and modernized as Hebrew evolved over the decades). Yet, although the influential Israeli critic Dov Sadan saw the genre of historical fiction as the basis for a new national literature, with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the “Romantic” presentation of the past seemed to

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lose its relevance. Instead, Israeli literature was dominated by writers whose concerns were more contemporary: the language of a new and emergent society.10 The novels of German-Jewish liberals such as Ludwig Philippson have long since fallen into obscurity. By contrast, neo-Orthodox historical fiction has remained a part of youth literature in the traditional Jewish world. The novels of Marcus Lehmann are still in print today: in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, Russian, and even in German, published by small religious presses in Jerusalem, New York, and Zurich.11 Robert Menasse’s 2001 novel Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (Driven out of Hell),12 is a unique, recent revival of the tradition of the Sephardic theme in post-Holocaust German literature. Appropriately, the novel led to Menasse being awarded the Lion Feuchtwanger Prize from the Berlin Akademie der Künste in 2002. The novel shifts between two historical settings, and two characters, one historical and the other fictional. Viktor Abravanel is a historian in present-day Austria; Menassah ben Israel is of course the Portuguese converso who returned to Judaism and became an important figure in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, making the case for the readmission of the Jews to Britain and associating with Rembrandt and Spinoza. The plotlines converge when Viktor Abravanel begins to research Menasse ben Israel, but the parallels form the structure of the novel. As a youth in postwar Austria (born in 1955), Viktor Abravanel learns of his family’s Jewish origins from his Catholic religion teacher on a class trip to Rome. But the priest’s message is mixed; he urges young Viktor to embrace Catholicism and universalism while he notes that the family name (and with it is imparted a sense of heritage or fate) is always bound up with an obstinate sense of difference. Viktor Abravanel takes this to heart, yet with frustrating consequences. Growing up in an era of rebellion and sharp ideological confrontation, Viktor Abravanel becomes an angry young leftist, a provacateur who finds himself isolated after denouncing his teachers’ Nazi-era past at a class reunion (the old teachers and classmates walk out together). The “hell” alluded to in the title is Abravanel’s metaphor for history: “History was hell. I saw informer’s files and transcripts of torture interrogations. Human beings were broken and souls put together anew. It was the production of souls on an almost industrial scale.”13 In Menasse’s novel, Viktor Abravanel’s

Post-Holocaust Echoes

efforts to open up the past lead to frustration and pain. The denial and repression that pervades the larger society is paralleled with the silence in his own family regarding their experiences of the Nazi era. Menasse’s post-Holocaust exploration of the Sephardic legacy shows the context for any revival of Jewish culture in contemporary Europe: a history wracked by the legacy of industrial murder, failed ideology, and anti-Jewish religious fanaticism. Robert Menasse’s Sephardic historical novel is at once a deeply personal story (reflecting naturally upon his own family name and biography), and at the same time an exposé of the new conditions of Jewish collective memory.

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Reference Matter

Notes

Introduction 1.  Franz Rosenzweig, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, Briefe und Tagebücher, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig, Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann, and Bernhard Casper (Haag: Nijhoff, 1979), vol. 2 (1918–29), 770 (entry of April 3, 1922). In the pages that follow, I will provide translations of all German texts. However, in sections where attention to the original German language is important, I have also provided the German text. 2.  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in The Realms of Memory, ed. Pierre Nora, 1: 1–20 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1: 1–20; and Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). On the first Wissenschaft des Judentums historians and Graetz, see, most recently, Michael Brenner, Prophets of the Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 17–72. 3.  Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany: From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 16. 4.  George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 5.  For an exemplary history of Jewish assimilation in the German-speaking countries, see Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: A History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 6.  See Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Portland, Oreg.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 234–40; and Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in NineteenthCentury Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), esp. 39–40, 62, 74–77, 136, 209 n. 43. 7.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 24–36. 8.  The seminal article on German-Jewish Sephardism is Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 71–92,

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Notes to Introduction first published in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 47–66, and anthologized in Yael Halevi-Wise, ed., Sephardism: Spanish-Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012), 35–57. On Moorish style synagogue architecture, see Harold Hammer-Schenk, Synagogen in Deutschland: Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1981); Hannelore Künzl, Islamische Stilelemente im Synagogenbau des 19. und des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (New York: Lang, 1984); Ivan Davidson Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 7:3 (Spring–Summer 2001): 68–100; and Annah Krieg, “The Walls of the Confessions: Neo-Romanesque Architecture, Nationalism, and Religious Identity in the Kaiserreich” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2010), 66–70. 9.  Salo Wittmayer Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), 2:365. This usage is reiterated in Baron, Steeled by Adversity: Essays Addressed on American-Jewish Life (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1971), 500. 10.  David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Shulamit Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland, 1780–1918 (Munich: Oldenburg, 1994). Dissimilation had also been used rarely in studies of Jewish literature, for example Kurt Dittmar, Assimilation und Dissimilation. ­Erscheinungsformen und Marginalitätsthematik bei jüdisch-amerikanischen ­Erzählern (1900–1970) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1978). 11.  Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, eds., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2, Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 12.  David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990): 17–33. See also Michael A. Meyer, “Jews as Jews Versus Jews as Germans: Two Historical Perspectives,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 36 (1991): xv–xxii. 13.  Dennis B. Klein, “Assimilation and Dissimilation. Peter Gay’s Freud, Jews, and other Germans,” New German Critique 19 (Winter 1980): 151–65. 14. Shulamit Volkov, “The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg, eds., The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, edited by ­Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New ­England, 1985), 195–211. 15. Volkov, Die Juden in Deutschland, 166–80. Stephanie Schüler-Springorum expands upon this in her study of the Jews of Königsberg, referring to dissimilation as the forces which worked to return integrated Jews to Judaism “despite themselves.” Stephanie Schüler-Springorum, “Assimilation and Community: The Jewish Community in Koenigsburg, 1871–1914,” Jewish Social Studies 5:3 (1999): 104–31. See also, most recently, Pierre Birnbaum, Geography of Hope: Exile, the Enlightenment, Disassimilation (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 34, 38, 401 n. 4. 16.  Gavriel Rosenfeld, “Defining ‘Jewish Art’ in Ost und West, 1901–8,” Leo

Notes to Introduction Baeck Institute Year Book 39 (1994): 83, 86; and Ritchie Robertson, The Jewish Question in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 17. Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 19. See additionally Stéphane Mosès and Ora Wiskind, “Scholem and Rosenzweig: The Dialectics of History,” History and Memory 2:2 (Winter 1990): 100–116; and also David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 80ff. 18.  Nitsa Ben-Ari elucidates some examples in Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit: Der deutsch-jüdische historische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer neuen jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006). 19.  Till van Rahden, “Treason, Fate, or Blessing? Narratives of Assimilation in the Historiography of German-Speaking Jewry Since the 1950s,” in Preserving the Legacy of German Jewry: A History of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1955–2005, edited by Christhard Hoffmann (Tübingen: Siebeck, 2005), 349–74; Scott Spector, “Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German-Jewish History,” Jewish History 20:3 (2006): 349–61. 20.  Van Rahden, “Treason, Fate, or Blessing?” 372. 21.  Reproduced in Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk, eds., Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Die Entdeckung des jüdischen Selbstbewusstseins in der Kunst (Cologne: Wienand, 1999), 220. See the discussion of the painting, ibid., 142–44. On Oppenheim, see also Ismar Schorsch, “Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German-Jewish Vision of Emancipation,” From Text to Context, 93–118. 22.  Parts of Chapters 1 and 3 incorporate my arguments developed earlier in Jonathan Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History Between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 19:2 (May 1999): 101–26; and Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History in the Margins of the Weimar Classics: Minority Culture and National Identity in Germany, 1837–1873,” in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität, 1750–1871, edited by Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 227–38. 23.  Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und s­ ozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004). 24.  Richard Humphrey, The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History: Three German Contributions; Alexis, Fontane, Döblin (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1986), 9. 25.  See Richard I. Cohen, “Nostalgia and the Return to the Ghetto,” in Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 45–90. 26. In addition to Schorsch, passim, see Carsten Schapkow, Vorbild und ­Gegenbild: Das iberische Judentum in der deutsch-jüdischen Erinnerungskultur, 1779–1939 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2011), 51–175.

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Notes to Introduction 27.  Schorsch, “Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” 92 n. 62. 28. Ibid., 75–76. 29.  Friedrich Rühs, Ueber die Ansprueche der Juden an das deutsche Buergerrecht: Mit einem Anhang ueber die Geschichte der Juden in Spanien, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1816). On Zunz’s relation to Rühs, see Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 219–21. 30.  The first source for this incident is Juan Antonio Llorente’s (1756–1823) history of the Inquisition, which was translated into German in 1824. It was popularized in William Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic (New York, Harper and Row, 1837), which appeared in German in 1842. Abravanel’s mission to Ferdinand and Isabella is also the subject of an 1890 painting by the Spanish painter Emilio Sala (1850–1910), which is in the National Museum at Granada. 31.  The widespread nineteenth-century German-Jewish fascination with Sephardic themes did not, evidently, extend to the visual arts. Although popular works of historical fiction were often illustrated in nineteenth-century Germany, this does not seem to have been the case with German-Jewish novels. Also lacking are grand-style Spanish-Jewish history paintings by German-Jewish artists. Moritz Oppenheim’s early works in the historical-mythological style of the Nazarenes focus on biblical subjects (Moses, Joshua) and his best-known paintings depict moments in German-Jewish history in the era of Emancipation (Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn, Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation) or traditional Jewish religious celebrations and customs. 32. See Barbara S. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze: Freedom is the Only King (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975). 33. Ibid., 74–76. 34. See Jochen Wierich, “Struggling Through History: Emanuel Leutze, Hegel, and Empire,” American Art 15:2 (Summer 2001): 52–71. 35.  Richard Gosche, Die Alhambra und der Untergang der Araber in ­Spanien: Ein Vortrag im wissenschaftlichen Vereine zu Berlin, am 4. Februar 1854 gehalten (Berlin: Hertz, 1854); see also Gosche, Erinnerungsblätter für seine Freunde (Halle: ­Hendel, 1890), which includes essays on Moses Mendelssohn and Berthold Auerbach. 36.  On Gosche, Orientalism, and Jews, see my essay “Lessing, Gosche, and German Orientalism,” Lessing Yearbook, forthcoming, 2015. On the place of German-Jewish Sephardism within the broader context of nineteenth-century Orientalism, see Martin Kramer’s introduction to The Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis, ed. Martin Kramer (Tel-Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, 1999), 1–48. See also John M. Efron, “From Mitteleuropa to the Middle East: Orientalism Through a Jewish Lens,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94:3 (Summer 2004): 490–520. The recent books by Sabine Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”—Die deutsche ­Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004); Ursula Wokoeck, German Orientalism:

Notes to Introduction and Chapter One The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2009); Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Nina Berman, German Literature on the Middle East: Discourses and Practices, 1000–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) do much to expand Edward Said’s milestone 1978 study (centered on the French and British cases), yet a comprehensive treatment of German Orientalism’s specific relation to Jews, balancing racist with liberal Orientalism and analyzing the complex role of Jewish Orientalists, remains a major desideratum. Susannah Heschel addresses this issue in Heschel, “German-Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool for De-Orientalizing Judaism,” New German Critique 117 (2012): 91–107, which forms part of a forthcoming book.

Chapter One: Jewish History Under the Sign of Secularization 1.  Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 157. In the following, I will use the English spelling Ahasuerus and the German spelling Ahasver interchangeably. 2. Ibid., 163. 3.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Biographie als neubürgerliche Kunstform,” Frankfurter Zeitung 29:6 (1930), reprinted in Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 75–80. 4.  Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration From Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 189. 5.  George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1965), 141–60. 6.  Reinhart Koselleck, “Richtlinien für das Lexikon politisch-sozialer Begriffe der Neuzeit,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 11 (1967): 81–99, here 91. 7.  See Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982); and Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3–21, 88–130. 8.  On the origins of modern Jewish historiography, see Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1994), especially 158–232; Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 77–103; and Sinai (Siegfried) Ucko, “Geistesgeschichtliche Grundlagen der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Wissenschaft des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich, ed. Kurt Wilhelm (Tübingen: Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, 1967), 328–36. 9.  See Anderson, Legend, 188–89. Croly’s novel was translated into German by Ludwig Storch, Der ewige Jude: Eine historische Novelle der Vorzeit (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1829). 10.  Gustav Pfizer, “Der ewige Jude,” in Gedichte (Stuttgart: Neff, 1831), 284– 89. Pfizer’s poem is evidence of another shift in the literary representation of ­Ahasuerus brought about by a new conception of history. The Wandering Jew is now identified with the Jews as a historical people who “like ruined graves carry

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Notes to Chapter One their suffering into all countries amidst fresh youthful peoples” (288). In Pfizer’s poem, Ahasuerus stands for the plight of a people bereft of historical consciousness. In the poem it is ambivalent whether this might mean something like a consciousness of their own status as a nation which might rise again or a tragic grasp of being an historical “anachronism” in a Christian or Hegelian teleology. See Anderson, Legend, 224. Pfizer’s “Der ewige Jude” made a significant impression on Berthold Auerbach, who referred to the poem in his Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur (Stuttgart: Fr. Brodhag’sche Buchhandlung, 1836). 11.  On nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary representations of the Wandering Jew, see Anderson, Legend, 161–398; Mona Körte, Die Uneinholbarkeit des Verfolgten: Der Ewige Jude in der literarischen Phantastik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000); and the anthology Ahasvers Spur: Dichtungen und Dokumente vom “Ewigen Juden,” ed. Mona Körte and Robert Stockhammer (Leipzig: Reclam, 1995). Arguing against Hans Mayer’s thesis that the anti-Jewish impact of the theologically encoded Wandering Jew was surpassed by that of the “Shylock” stereotype in modern literature, Paul Lawrence Rose illustrates the longevity of the Ahasver image in nineteenth-century Germany. See Hans Mayer, Außenseiter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1977), 313–15; and Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ ton University Press, 1990). See also Jonathan Skolnik, “Le juif errant et le temps historique: Images littéraires des temps modernes,” in Le témoin du temps: Images du juif errant, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Paris: Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, 2002), 240–50. 12.  Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: Ein historischer Roman, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: J. Scheible’s Buchhandlung, 1837). The literary motif of a mortal Wandering Jew was first introduced in Arnim’s Halle und Jerusalem (1809–10); see Anderson, ­Legend, 193–94. The most complete study of Auerbach remains Anton Bettelheim, Berthold Auerbach: Der Mann, Sein Werk, Sein Nachlaß (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger, 1907). See also the chronology in Marbacher Magazin 36 (1985), and the interpretations of Auerbach’s career in Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, 224–50; David Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 140–55; Nancy A. K ­ aiser, “Berthold Auerbach: The Dilemma of the Jewish Humanist from Vormärz to Empire,” German Studies Review 6:3 (October 1983): 399–420; and Jeffrey L. Sammons, “­Observations on Berthold Auerbach’s Jewish Novels,” Orim: A Jewish Journal at Yale 1:2 (Spring 1986): 177–91. 13. Auerbach, Spinoza, 2: 298–300. This and subsequent translations from the German are my own unless otherwise noted. 14.  In this and the following, my analysis diverges from Anderson, Legend, 224. Anderson seriously misreads the passage, ascribing proto-Zionist positions to Auerbach based on a positive reading of his Wandering Jew figure. Following Anderson, Rose (Revolutionary Antisemitism, 231) incorrectly (and ahistorically) attributes an early “Zionist” phase to Auerbach. Auerbach’s characterization of Ahasver as “one

Notes to Chapter One of the three great symbols of Weltschmerz” (Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, 231) must be understood in the context of his opposition to this literary tradition. See Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 142–43. Until his last years, Auerbach never wavered in his belief in a synthesis of humanism and German nationalism in which Jews could participate as Jews and, in 1862, Auerbach broke with Moses Hess, with whom he had maintained a friendly correspondence since 1835, over the latter’s newfound Jewish nationalism. See Moses Hess, Briefwechsel, ed. Edmund Silberner (‘S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1959), 53, 375–76, 417–18; and Hess’s public rebuttal to Auerbach’s liberalism in Hess, Rom und Jerusalem, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Kaufmann, 1899), 11. On Auerbach’s politics, see Bettelheim, Berthold Auerbach; Moses Zwick, Berthold Auerbachs sozialpolitischer und ethischer Liberalismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933); and the discussion of his Studien und Anmerkungen zu Lessings Nathan der Weise (1858), in Kaiser, “Berthold Auerbach,” 410–12. 15.  David Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 140. See also Jacob Katz, Die Entstehung der Judenassimilation in Deutschland und deren Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main: Droller, 1935). 16.  Louis Seligmann, review of Auerbach, Spinoza, in Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (Literarisches und Homiletisches Beiblatt), March 17, 1838, 27–28. Seligmann, a rabbi in Kaiserslauten, was a close friend of Auerbach. See Berthold Auerbach, Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loenig, 1884), 1: 14. 17.  See the discussion of the larger problematic in Deborah Hertz, “Seductive Conversion in Berlin, 1770–1809,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd Endelman (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), 48–82, and Endelman’s introduction to this volume, 1–19; and Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademische Berufe: Jüdische Studenten und Akademiker in Deutschland, 1678–1848 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974), 104ff. 18. Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism. See also Hartmut Steinecke, “Gutzkow, die Juden und das Judentum,” in Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1989), pt. 2, 2–29. 19. Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 140–55; and George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 4–46. Both Sorkin and Mosse base their arguments on analyses of Auerbach’s popular Dorfgeschichten of the 1840s. 20.  David Honigmann, “Die deutsche Belletristik als Vorkämpferin für die Emancipation der Juden: Ein literarhistorischer Umriß,” Der Freihafen: Galerie von Unterhaltungsbildern aus den Kreisen der Literatur, Gesellschaft und Wissenschaft 7:2 (1844): 51–79. 21.  Dov Sadan, ’al-Sifruteinu: Masat mavo (Jerusalem: ha-Mahlakah le-inyene ha-no’ar, 1949). For Sadan, the rupture created a productive tension and he later hailed the Hebrew historical novel as the harbinger of a new cultural synthesis. See Dan Miron’s critique “Modern Hebrew Literature: Zionist Perspectives and

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Notes to Chapter One I­ sraeli Realities,” in What Is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 95–118. 22.  On the problematic relation of the Western-language Jewish writer to the myth of a “secret language of the Jews,” see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-­Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 23.  Jacob Katz, “Berthold Auerbach’s Anticipation of the German-Jewish Tragedy,” Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982): 216–33. 24. Bettelheim, Berthold Auerbach, 59–104. 25. Auerbach, Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur. 26. Ibid., 11. 27.  Nathan Rotenstreich, Tradition and Reality: The Impact of History on Modern Jewish Thought (New York: Random House, 1974), 17. 28. Auerbach, Das Judenthum, 5, 14. 29. Ibid., 16–21. On Jewish religious thought in nineteenth-century Germany, see Max Wiener, Jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (Berlin: Philo, 1933). 30.  “Also Sie bleiben uns in der Tat nahe und ein werther Bundesgenosse, dass Sie auch an der inneren sittlich-religiösen Veredelung der Juden gern Antheil nehmen—und das heisst hier bloss ernste religiöse Reform.” Letter of Geiger to Auerbach (December 25, 1843), in Abraham Geigers Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Ludwig Geiger (Berlin: Gerschel, 1878), 5: 172. On Geiger’s historical thinking, see Michael A. Meyer, “Abraham Geiger’s Historical Judaism,” in New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger, ed. Jacob Petuchowski (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion Press, 1975), 3–16. See also Amos Funkenstein, “­Reform und Geschichte: Die Modernisierung des deutschen Judentums,” in Deutsche Juden und die Moderne, ed. Shulamit Volkov (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 1–8. 31.  Indeed, Auerbach’s next novel, Dichter und Kaufmann (1840), would tell the story of the eighteenth-century German-language Jewish poet Ephraim Moses Kuh. On the neglected French-Jewish novelist Eugénie Foa, who wrote historical novels before Auerbach, see Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 219 and passim. 32.  Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1977), 7: 67–88. On the Yossipon in the context of Jewish historical thought, see Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 34–35, 40. 33.  For critical discussions of theories of “Jewish literature,” see Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 15–18; Hans Otto Horch and Itta Shedletzky, “Die deutschjüdische Literatur und ihre Geschichte,” in Neues Lexikon des Judentums, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1992), 291–94; and Wirth-Nesher, ed., What Is Jewish Literature? 34.  On Beer, see Lothar Kahn, “Michael Beer (1800–1833),” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 12 (1967): 149–60.

Notes to Chapter One 35.  Gabriela von Glasenapp, Aus der Judengasse: Zur Entstehung und Ausprägung deutschsprachiger Ghettoliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 33. 36. Auerbach, Das Judenthum. In a discussion of Beer’s drama, Auerbach did speculate that had Beer cast a Jewish protagonist, the impact of the play might have been blunted due to the German public’s negative perception of Jewish figures on the stage. See Berthold Auerbach, “Michael Beer,” in Galerie der ausgezeichneten Israeliten aller Jahrhunderte, ihre Portraits und Biographien, vol. 5 (Stuttgart, 1838), 24, cited in Jacob Katz, “Berthold Auerbach’s Anticipation,” 233. 37.  Alfred Döblin, “Der historische Roman und wir,” in Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden, ed. Walter Muschg and Heinz Graber, 15 vols. (Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1960–71), vol. 7 (Aufsätze zur Literatur), 163–86. A comprehensive survey of theories of historical fiction is contained in Hugo Aust, Der historische Roman (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994). 38.  Harro Müller, Giftpfeile: Zu Theorie und Literatur der Moderne (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994), 233–45. 39.  See Hans Otto Horch, “Judenbilder in der realistischen Erzählliteratur: Jüdische Figuren bei Gustav Freytag, Fritz Reuter, Berthold Auerbach und Wilhelm Raabe,” in Juden und Judentum in der Literatur, ed. Herbert A. Strauss and Christhard Hoffmann (Munich: DTV, 1985), 157. 40.  Berthold Auerbach, letter of June 29, 1830, quoted in Samuel Meisels, Judenköpfe (Vienna: der Neuzeit, 1925), 139. Auerbach’s full name was Moshe Baruch (evoking both Mendelssohn and Spinoza), and the author’s affinity for Moses Mendelssohn was profoundly bound up with his Spinoza reception. Spinoza’s thought continued to occupy Auerbach. As translator and editor of the five-volume German edition of his works which remained standard in the 1840s, Auerbach was a significant promoter of Spinoza and also planned an edition of Mendelssohn’s works. 41.  In this respect, David Sorkin’s analysis of Spinoza as a literary example of a “failure to find community” is at odds with his larger thesis that the participation in secular culture formed an essential part of a new German-Jewish identity. See Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 147–48. 42.  Hans Otto Horch, “1843: Auerbach’s First Collection of Dorfgeschichten,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 160. 43.  See Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 44. Karl Gutzkow, Der Sadduzäer von Amsterdam, in Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Literarische Anstalt, 1846), 11: 99–170. On Gutzkow’s literary treatment of Jews and Judaism, see Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, 185–210; Steinecke, “Gutzkow”; and Florian Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 85–99.

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Notes to Chapter One 45. Gutzkow, Der Sadduzäer, 116. 46. Ibid., 112–13. 47. Gutzkow’s 1846 five-act tragedy Uriel Acosta, a reworking of Der ­Sadduzäer von Amsterdam, is relatively free of the provocative anti-Jewish asides which pepper the 1834 story. The play version was tremendously influential and translated into many languages. The Hebrew and Yiddish versions were widely performed in Eastern Europe (the only one of Gutzkow’s works to be translated into Jewish languages in the nineteenth-century), and led to a positive appreciation of Gutzkow by Jewish Enlighteners. See Samuel Meisels, Deutsche Klassiker im Ghetto (Vienna: der Neuzeit, 1922). Gutzkow’s later (1862) notes on the play, however, are typical of his backhanded progressivism regarding the Jewish Question: while proudly acknowledging Rubin’s Hebrew translation (alongside translations into Hungarian, Italian, and Swedish), and protesting those Germans who refused to perform his “Judenstueck,” Gutzkow claims the only moral failing of his protagonist is his lingering sentiment of common interest with the “Ahasverossoehne.” See Karl Gutzkow, “Anmerkung,” Dramatische Werke (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1862), 8: 112–14. 48.  Hartmut Steinecke, ed., Romantheorie und Romankritik in Deutschland: Die Entwicklung des Gattungsverständnisses von der Scott-Rezeption bis zum programmatischen Realismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975), 1: 75. 49. Gutzkow, Der Sadduzäer, 101. 50.  For a presentation of the “Ahasver-Streit,” see Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur: Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeit­ung des Judentums,” 1837–1922 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985), 46–48; for critical perspectives on Gutzkow’s diatribe and its influence on Wagner’s anti-Semitic thought, see Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism, 193–202. 51.  On the Spinoza controversy (also known as the “pantheism controversy”), see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 44–108; Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Routledge, 1974), 593–652, 729–44; Leo Strauss, “Einleitung,” in Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart: Holzborg, 1971); and Hermann Timm, Gott und die Freiheit: Studien zur Religionsphilosophie der Goethezeit (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1974). 52.  Moses Mendelssohn, An die Freunde Lessings: Ein Anhang zu Herrn Jacobi Briefwechsel über die Lehre des Spinoza (Berlin: Voß und Sohn, 1786), 28–29. 53.  Michael Graetz, “‘Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts’ und jüdisches Selbstbewusstsein im 19. Jahrhundert,” Wolfenbüttler Studien zur Aufklärung 4 (1977): 273–95. 54. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Klaus-Detlef Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker, 1986), 14: 692–95. For a discussion of Goethe’s fragment, see Anderson, Legend, 168–73. 55. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 14: 731. 56.  On the canonization of German classicism in the formation of a national

Notes to Chapter One culture, see Klaus L. Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles: Zur Entstehung der Klassik-Legende im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Die Klassik-Legende, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971), 50–78; Peter Uwe ­Hohendahl, Literarische Kultur im Zeitalter des Liberalismus (Munich: Beck, 1985). On the relation of Jewish critics and literati to the process of canonization, see Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, 10–11, 42–46, and Goethe in ­German-Jewish Culture, ed. Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2001). Auerbach’s productive continuation of Goethe’s plan elicited contempt, not only from anti-Semitic literary critics such as Albert Soergel, Ahasver-Dichtungen seit Goethe (Leipzig: Voitgtländer, 1905), 57–61; but also from Fritz Mauthner, who dismissed Auerbach’s work as “klein und ­beschämend” in comparison with Goethe’s project. See Fritz Mauthner, Spinoza (Berlin, 1906), 75, quoted in Günter Helmes, “Spinoza in der schönen Literatur: Bilder aus der Zeit zwischen Vormärz und Weimarer Republik,” Studia Spinozana 5 (1989): 119– 49, here 124. Mauthner’s critique should be understood as one based on ideology, not literary quality, for Mauthner was himself partial to the Wandering Jew theme, which he saw as adequate for the representation of modern anti-Semitism. See Mauthner’s novel, Der neue Ahasver (1882). See also his interesting theory that the legend of the Wandering Jew arose as a reaction to rationalist Bible criticism, in Fritz Mauthner, Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1920), 1: 655. 57. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 14: 691–92. 58.  See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 48–50; and the critique in Graetz, “Die Erziehung,” 273–74. 59. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 81–82. For an overview of the GermanJewish reception of Spinoza, see Leo Strauss, preface to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. by E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965), 1–31 and 154–70. See also Siegfried Hessing, ed., Spinoza-Festschrift (Heidelberg: Winter, 1933). 60.  On Spinoza and Jewish identity in the modern world, see, most recently, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 61.  Indeed, it is still contested in contemporary scholarship. See the differing views of David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), who argues (based on a comparison of the philosopher’s Hebrew and German writings) that the historical Mendelssohn used modern philosophical method to legitimize religious tradition; and Alan Arkush, review of Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, by David Sorkin, Modern Judaism 17:2 (May 1997): 179–85, who sees countertraditional signposts in Mendelssohn’s rhetoric. 62. Heinrich Heine, “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in

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Notes to Chapter One Deutschland,” in Heinrich Heine: Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Düsseldorfer Ausgabe), ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1979), vol. 8, pt. 1, 71 (henceforth cited as DHA). 63.  Michael A. Meyer, “Reform Jewish Thinkers and their German Context,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture, ed. Jehudah Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 64–84, esp. 66. 64.  Immanuel Wolf, “Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums,” Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judentums 1:1 (1822): 14. 65.  For a succinct overview, see Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, xvii–xxi. 66. Auerbach, Spinoza, 2: 262. 67.  Auerbach was occupied with Mendelssohn’s thought at the time of writing Spinoza and corresponded with publishers about the possibility of editing a complete edition of Mendelssohn’s works to follow his Spinoza edition. See Bettel­ heim, Berthold Auerbach, 122. 68.  Berthold Auerbach, Dichter und Kaufmann: Ein Lebensgemälde aus der Zeit Moses Mendelssohns, in Berthold Auerbachs Romane (Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1871), esp. 2: 131–34. 69.  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 105. On the place of Weber’s theory in the formation of the historical discourse of secularization, see G. Marramao, “Säkularisierung,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe, 1992), 8: 1133–61. 70.  For a critical inventory of narrative characteristics of historical fiction, see Richard Humphrey, The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1986), 8–34. 71.  Auerbach revised Spinoza in 1854, and the revised version is included in all subsequent editions of his works. In the following, my notes discuss some diversions from the (difficult-to-obtain) 1837 original as they relate to the passages cited in the text. A thorough comparison of the two versions remains a desideratum. See Gabriele von Glasenapp, “Spielarten jüdischer Identitätsbestimmung im frühen 19. Jahrhundert: Berthold Auerbachs Spinoza-Roman,” in Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, ed. Hanna Delf, Julius H. Schoeps, and Manfred Walther (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994), 304. Here, the revised version has Spinoza discover his family history from a written testament. The 1837 version has Spinoza’s father tell the story, which is identical in all essential aspects. 72. Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: 64. This formulation is absent in the 1837 version. 73. Ibid., 64–65. This formulation is also absent from the 1837 edition. 74. Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: 179. 75. Ibid., 1: 90. In contrast to Spinoza’s apparently positive “universalistic” orientation toward Maimonides mentioned above, here the critique of Maimonides is sharpened in the revised edition. Compare Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: 205–56.

Notes to Chapter One 76.  Auerbach prefaces Spinoza’s fifth chapter with a quote from the Talmud proclaiming: “Cursed be he who allows his son to learn Greek science.” See Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: 73. 77. Auerbach, Schriften, 1: 101. The intellectual critique of Christianity is less pointed in the 1837 version. Compare ibid., 2: 194–95. 78. Ibid., 2: 18–20. 79. Ibid., 1: 224. 80.  Beate Rosenfeld, Die Golemsage und ihre Verwertung in der deutschen Literatur (Breslau: Verlag Dr. Hans Priebatsch, 1934), 86–90. Auerbach’s version of the legend in Spinoza is one of the early examples of the connection of Rabbi Löw to the golem legend, which occurred only in the late 1700s. 81. Auerbach, Spinoza, 2: 21. 82. Ibid., 1: 166–67. 83. Ibid., 1: 71. 84. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 71–92, esp. 81–82. 85.  See also Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; and Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The Eastern European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982). 86.  Seligmann, review of Spinoza, 28. 87. Schorsch, From Text to Context, 81. 88.  As quoted by Chisdai, Spinoza’s devout rival in the novel. Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: 157. 89.  Shakespeare’s Edmund (King Lear), for example. 90.  Indeed, in one nineteenth-century German-Jewish historical novel with orthodox tendencies, Spinoza is simply written out of Jewish history through a (false) characterization of him as a convert to Christianity. 91.  Auerbach’s explanatory footnotes, which cite some morsel of historical evidence for most of his fictionalizations (including, following Johannes Colerus, Spinoza’s love for Olympia van der Ende), stress the necessity of including this legend despite the lack of a reliable source. See Spinoza, 2: 301–4, esp. 303. 92. Ibid., 2: 286. The element of contemplative retreat from the world is enhanced in the revised version. Cf. ibid., 1: 280. 93. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, 14: 730. 94.  On the reaction against radical secularization in Haskalah thought, see Shmuel Feiner, “The Pseudo-Enlightenment and the Question of Jewish Modernization,” Jewish Social Studies 3:1 (Fall 1996): 62–88. 95. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, 80. 96. Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: iii. 97.  For Menzel’s embrace of the historical novel as the “democratic . . . novel of the people,” see Wolfgang Menzel, “Walter Scott und sein Jahrhundert” (1827), in Steinecke, ed., Romantheorie und Romankritik in Deutschland, 2: 52–60. See also Steinecke’s discussion of Das junge Deutschland ’s rejection of the historical novel as “rotten fish” in contrast to the “freshness” of engaged writing, Steinecke, ed.,

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Notes to Chapters One and Two 1: 73–77. On Auerbach’s quest for an “objective” literary medium, see Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry, 143, 217. 98. Auerbach, Spinoza, 1: ix. 99. Ibid., 1: vii. 100.  See the discussion of nineteenth-century “ghetto stories,” in Richard I. Cohen, “Nostalgia and ‘return to the ghetto’: a cultural phenomenon in Western and Central Europe,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in NineteenthCentury Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 130–55, reprinted in Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 154–85. The genre of “ghetto stories” (starting with the tales of Wolf Pascheles published in Prague in the 1820s and made popular by Leopold Kompert, Karl Emil Franzos, and the paintings of Moritz Oppenheim) would indeed become very popular with non-Jewish as well as Jewish readers in nineteenth-century Germany. See Gabriele von Glasenapp, Aus der Judengasse: Zur Entstehung und Ausprägung deutschsprachiger Ghettoliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996); Gabriele von Glasenapp and Hans Otto Horch, eds., Ghettoliteratur: Eine Dokumentation zur deutsch-jüdischen Liter­aturgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005); Florian Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen: Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), 89–100; and Jonathan M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 72–110.

Chapter Two: “Who learns history from Heine?” 1.  On the genesis of the novel, see Manfred Windfuhr’s commentary in Heine, DHA, 5: 498–768. On the Damascus affair and Heine’s reaction, see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2.  Heine knew Auerbach’s novel, and offered qualified praise for it. See his letter to August Lewald of December 4, 1837, cited in Siegbert Solomon Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy: A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 412. 3.  On the Cultur-Verein and Heine’s involvement, see Hanns Günther Reissner, Eduard Gans: Ein Leben im Vormärz (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), 81–101; and Edith Lutz, Der “Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden” und sein ­Mitglied H. Heine (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997). The Hep-Hep riots were notable in that they especially targeted symbols of Jewish emancipation and social advancement. See Stefan Rohrbacher, “The ‘Hep-Hep’ Riots of 1819: Anti-Jewish Ideology, Agitation, and Violence,” in Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History, ed. Christhard Hoffmann et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 23–42. 4.  On Heine’s historical thinking, see Jürgen Ferner, Versöhnung und Progression: Zum geschichtsphilosophischen Denken Heinrich Heines (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994).

Notes to Chapter Two 5.  Eliezer Raphael Malachi, Cabalists in the Land of Israel (Yiddish) (New York: Kineret, 1928), 83. Cited in Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-­Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 79. 6.  See the letters to Moser in Heine, HSA, vol. 20, esp. pp. 87, 168, 176, 215; and to Zunz, 216, 248ff. 7.  Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 44–45. 8. On Heine’s reception of Scott, see Manfred Windfuhr, “Der Erzähler Heine: ‘Der Rabbi von Bacherach’ als historischer Roman,” in Heinrich Heine: Ästhetisch-politische Profile, ed. Gerhard Höhn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 276–94. 9.  Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (New York: Bantam, 1988), 1. 10. Heine, The Rabbi of Bacherach, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland and Elizabeth Petuchowski, in Heinrich Heine, Jewish Stories and Hebrew Melodies (New York: Markus Wiener, 1987), 21. For the original German, see Heine, DHA, 5: 109. Further citations from these editions will be noted parenthetically within the body of the text, with the page number for the English translation followed by the German page number from DHA in italics, as here (21, 109). 11.  Reinhart Koselleck, “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,” Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 3–20. On Scott, see Richard Humphrey, The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1986). 12. Heine, DHA, vol. 8, pt. 1, 126. 13.  See Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 46; Schorsch, “The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History,” in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 376–88; Nils Roemer, “Turning Defeat into Victory: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Martyrs of 1096,” Jewish History 13:2 (Fall 1999): 65–80. 14.  See Hans-Peter Bayerdorfer, “Jüdisches Mittelalter in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Das Weiterleben des Mittelalters in der deutschen Literatur, ed. James Poag and Gerhild Scholz-Williams (Königstein: Athenäum, 1983), 122–41. The fact that Heine returned to work on Der Rabbi von Bacherach at a time of heightened Franco-German conflict over the Rhine river in 1840 accentuates this dimension. 15.  On Heine’s relation to Spanish-Jewish themes, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 80–81; Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 85–96; and Philipp Veit, “Heine: The Marrano Pose,” Monatshefte 66:2 (1974): 145–56. 16.  Florian Krobb, “‘Mach die Augen zu, schöne Sara’: Heinrich Heines Der Rabbi von Bacherach,” Selbstdarstellungen: Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), 46–57. 17. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 178–79.

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Notes to Chapter Two 18.  See the discussion in Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 383–401. 19.  On the evolution and popularization of Wissenschaft des Judentums, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, passim; Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, eds., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, vol. 2, Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 132–35, 333–41; and Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). 20.  Michael Sachs, Die religiöse Poesie der Juden in Spanien (Berlin: Veit, 1845). On Heine’s source material, see DHA, vol. 3, pt. 2, 896–906; on Sachs and “Sephardic supremacy,” see Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 83–84. 21.  Heinrich Heine, “Jehuda ben Halevy,” trans. Hal Draper, Jewish Stories and Hebrew Melodies, 104–5. For the German original, see Heine, DHA, vol. 3, pt. 2, 132. Further citations from these editions will be noted parenthetically within the body of the text. 22. See the entry on “Haggada” in Jüdisches Lexikon, 2: 1330–35. Contemporary German texts use the spellings “Haggada,” “Aggada,” and “Agode” interchangeably. 23.  Heine’s understanding of “Halacha” and “Haggadah” as distinct literary models for the posttraditional Jewish writer is echoed in the twentieth century by both Haim N. Bialik and Walter Benjamin, with very different emphases. Benjamin privileges “Haggadah,” interpreting Franz Kafka’s prose as a mode of narrative which always subverts structure, law, and stasis. See Walter Benjamin “Franz Kafka,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 122. For Bialik, the modern Jewish writer can forgo neither the aesthetic mode of Haggadah nor the “higher spiritual force” of Halacha: “Aggada without Halakah is as one bereaved.” H. N. Bialik. Law and Legend or Halakah and Aggada (New York: Bloch, 1923), 27–28. 24.  Willi Goetschel, “Rhyming History: A Note on the Hebrew Melodies,” Germanic Review 74:4 (Fall 1999): 280. Compare also Roger F. Cook, By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). 25.  On the tensions in Heine’s writing between artistic autonomy and political engagement, see the thoughtful essay “Poetry Versus Politics,” in Ritchie Robertson, Heine (New York: Grove, 1988), 1–28. 26.  Goetschel, “Rhyming History,” 277. 27.  On the ideology of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, see Schorsch, From Text to Context; Yerushalmi, Zakhor; and Sinai (Siegfried) Ucko, “Geistesgeschichtliche Grundlagen der Wissenschaft des Judentums,” in Wissenschaft des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich, ed. Kurt Wilhelm (Tübingen: Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts, 1967), 328–36. 28.  Leopold Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Louis Gerschel, 1875), 1: 3.

Notes to Chapter Two 29. Ibid., 4. 30.  Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 181–82. 31. Maren R. Niehoff, “Jacob Weil’s Contribution to a Modern Concept of Haggadah,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 41 (1996): 21–50; Niehoff, “Heine und die jüdische Tradition,” in “Ich, Narr des Glücks”: Heinrich Heine, 1797–1856, Bilder einer Ausstellung, ed. Joseph A. Kruse (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 318–24; Niehoff, “Die Wiederentdeckung der Hagada im 19. Jahrhundert und die Suche nach einer modernen jüdischen Identität,” Jüdischer Almanach des Leo Baeck Instituts (1995): 69–79. 32. Zunz, Die Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden (1882), 125–26, cited in Maren Niehoff, “Zunz’s Concept of Haggadah as an Expression of Jewish Spirituality,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 3–24. 33. On Gershom Scholem’s criticisms, see Peter Schäfer, “Gershom Scholem und die ‘Wissenschaft des Judentums,’” in Gerschom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 122–56. 34.  Todd Samuel Pressner’s insightful chapter on Heine’s Reisebilder highlights ways in which a broader series of texts by Heine texts can be seen to subvert Hegel­ian ideas of world history, especially as these Hegelian ideas marginalize Jewish identity in modernity. See Presner, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 115–46. It is beyond the scope of my aims in this book to show how Heine’s response to Wissenschaft des Judentums in Der Rabbi von Bacherach also critiques the Hegelianism of some of its early theorists, but my approach here is congruent with Pressner’s views. For another approach to Heine as subversive of a dominant discourse of national folklore, see Elliott Schreiber, “Tainted Sources: The Subversion of the Grimms’ Ideology of the Folktale in Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach,” German Quarterly 78 (2005): 23–44. 35.  See the reprint and the accompanying essays in Emile Schrijver and Falk Wiesemann, eds., Die von Geldern Haggadah und Heinrich Heines “Der Rabbi von Bacherach” (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1997). 36.  HSA, 20: 215. 37.  See, among others, Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen ­Erzählliteratur: Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums,” 1837– 1922 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985), 139. 38.  Jeffrey Sammons thus characterizes the marked break in style as an aesthetic flop, a failure to find “the proper form to master the [content].” Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Heine’s The Rabbi of Bacherach: The Unresolved Tensions,” German Quarterly 37:1 (January 1964): 36. 39.  Margaret Rose combines a structural analysis with biographical criticism, interpreting the fragment’s move from the Romantic to the parodic as an adequate representation of the subject matter. Rose sees the ironic self-portrait of apostasy

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Notes to Chapter Two in the third chapter as a comment on Heine’s early nineteenth-century present that is both a satire of a lack of freedom (the compulsion to conversion in an era of emancipationist hopes) and a suggestion of a revolutionary, sensualist notion of freedom. Margaret A. Rose, “Über die strukturelle Einheit von Heines Fragment ‘Der Rabbi von Bacherach,’” Heine-Jahrbuch 16 (1976): 47–48. 40.  See Schorsch, From Text to Context, 71–92; Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 400; and Bluma Goldstein, “Heine’s ‘Hebrew Melodies’: A Politics and Poetics of Diaspora,” in Heinrich Heine’s Contested Identities: Politics, Religion, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Lang, 1999), 49–68. 41. On the changing conception of Quelle in nineteenth-century German historical thought, see Odilo Engels, Horst Günther, and Reinhart Koselleck, “­Geschichte, Historie,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Cone, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 2: 677, 695. 42.  See Heine, DHA, vol. 5, esp. 274–80, 534–36, 583–87, and the letters to Moser, in Heine, HSA, vol. 20, especially pp. 87, 168, 176, 215, and to Zunz, 216, 248ff. 43. Heine, HSA, 20: 204. 44. Heine, DHA, 5: 281 45. Heine, HSA, 20: 204. 46.  See A. Horstmann, “Philologie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel: Schwabe, 1992), 7: 563–64. On Zunz’s reception of Boeckh and Wolf, see Schorsch, From Text to Context, 222–24, 346; Fritz Bamberger, “Zunz’s Conception of History,” in Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 11 (1941): 11–25; Bamberger, ed., Das Buch Zunz: Eingeleitet und herausgegeben von Fritz Bamberger (n.d.), 19; Céline TrautmannWaller, Philologie allemande et tradition juive: Le parcours intellectuel de Leopold Zunz (Paris: Cerf, 1998); Reinhard Markner and Giuseppe Veltri, eds., Friedrich August Wolf: Studien, Dokumente, Bibliographie (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999), especially the essay by Giuseppe Veltri, “Altertumswissenschaft und Wissenschaft des Judentums,” 32–47. 47.  On the reception of Hegelian thought among the Cultur-Verein members, and Heine’s reactions, see Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy, 14–42. 48. Heine, DHA, 6: 160. 49. Ibid., 7: 28–29. 50. How the academic historian Zunz viewed the popular historical novel of Jewish history is unclear. Zunz’s response to Philipp Ehrenburg’s disdainful stance toward Ludwig Philippson is unavailable, though Zunz’s wife describes the couple’s mutual passion for Walter Scott. See Leopold and Adelheid Zunz: An Account in Letters, 1815–1885, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1958), 278, 323–24. 51.  This English translation is from Israel Tabak, Judaic Lore in Heine (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 45. 52.  On Heine’s life, see Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biog-

Notes to Chapter Two raphy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). See also Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy. 53.  Zunz’s concept of what constitutes a “Jewish source” is intended to be as inclusive as possible, in line with his program for a Jewish history no longer restricted to theological concerns. Thus, Manfred Windfuhr misreads Heine’s letter as a confession of estrangement from the Cultur-Verein as the result of his baptism. See Windfuhr, “Der Erzähler Heine,” 280. 54. Zunz, Gesammelte Schriften, 1: 6. 55. Ibid., 1: 59, 4. 56.  In a letter to Moser, December 14, 1825, HSA, 20: 227. 57.  Here I would dissent from the view expressed by Christhard Hoffmann in his thoughtful study of Der Rabbi von Bacherach that “this form of narration had structurally more in common with traditional Jewish group memory than with the emerging historiography,” emphasizing instead the ways in which Heine’s notion of Haggadah is predicated upon the recognition of a fissure with traditional group memory. See Christhard Hoffmann, “History Versus Memory: Heinrich Heine and the Jewish Past,” in Heinrich Heine’s Contested Identities, ed. Hermand and Holub, 32. 58.  See Schorsch, From Text To Context, 80–81. 59. Heine, DHA, vol. 8, pt. 1, 126. 60.  See Sammons, “Heine’s Rabbi von Bacherach.” 61. Heine DHA, 10: 263. 62.  See Windfuhr’s discussion in Heine, DHA, 5: 703. 63.  Thus Jost Hermand has interpreted this double model of Jewish identity in Heine’s open-ended fragment as an adequate literary expression of cosmopolitan ideal articulated by a minority, one which fails to find a response in the dominant society. See Jost Hermand, “Die nur schwer zu romantisierende Geschichte der Juden: Heines Rabbi von Bacherach,” in Romantik im Vormärz (Marburger Kolloquien zur Vormärz-Forschung Band 4), ed. Burghard Dedner and Ulla Hofstaetter (Marburg: Hietzeroth, 1992), 129–45. 64.  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote (New York: Penguin Books, 1950), 55. Heine would have found a reference to the works of Jehuda Abravanel (Leone Ebreo) in Cervantes’ preface, 29. 65. On Almansor, see Mounir Fendri, Halbmond, Kreuz und Schiboleth: Heinrich Heine und der islamische Orient (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1980). 66. See Manfred Tietz, ed., Das Spanieninteresse im deutschen Sprachraum (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1989). 67.  As Michael Ragussis has shown in his study of the English historiography and historical fiction, the unconverted Jew becomes a sign for cultural anxiety in an age of national consolidation. All the more so in Germany, where both the public debate over emancipation and the emergence of Jewish writers occurred much earlier. See Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).

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Notes to Chapters Two and Three 68.  Rose, “Über die strukturelle,” 40–43. 69.  Heine’s fragment marks the beginning of a German-Jewish fascination with Isaac Abravanel which extends into the post-Holocaust era. See Skolnik, “Die seltsame Karriere der Familie Abarbanel,” in Aufklärung und Skepsis: Internationaler Heine-Kongreß 1997 zum 200. Geburtstag, ed. Joseph A. Kruse, Bernd Witte and Karin Füllner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998): 322–33. On Abarbanel, see Jean-­Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel: La mémoire et l’esperance (Paris: Cerf, 1992); and Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaak Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher (Philadaelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972). 70.  On Heine’s research into the history of the Abravanels, see Windfuhr’s commentary in Heine, DHA, 5: 578–83. 71.  There have been several attempts by scholars to ascertain which Haggadah may have served as Heine’s source. See Windfuhr’s commentary in DHA, 5: 530–31. While there is absolutely no concrete evidence that Heine possessed a Haggadah with Abarbanel’s commentary, these were hardly uncommon and it is entirely plausible that anyone who researched the Abarbanel family would have known of its existence.

Chapter Three: Minority Culture in the Age of the Nation 1.  Johanna Philippson, “Ludwig Philippson und die Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,” in Das Judentum in der deutschen Umwelt, 1800–1850: Studien zur Frühgeschichte der Emanzipation, ed. Hans Liebeschütz and Arnold Paucker (Tübingen: Mohr, 1977), 243–91. For a biographical sketch, see Joseph Kornfeld, “Ludwig Philippson.” Yearbook of the Central Conference of American Rabbis 21 (1911): 149–90. 2.  Max Ring, Das Haus Hillel: Historischer Roman aus der Zeit der Zerstörung Jerusalems (Berlin: Jahnke, 1879), 3 vols., first published in Deutsche Roman-­ Zeitung 2 (1879). 3.  Influential nineteenth-century German-Jewish literary critics, however, saw all works on Jewish themes by Jewish authors as “Jewish literature.” In his history of Jewish literature, Gustav Karpeles discusses Ring together with Philippson, Lehman, and Formstecher in a section on the historical novel. Gustav Karpeles, Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (Berlin: von Robert Oppenheim, 1886), 1136. 4.  See Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 240; and Jüdisches Lexikon (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1930), 4: “Presse.” 5.  On the AZJ, see Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur: Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837–1922) (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985). For a survey of liberal, Orthodox, and Zionist journals see Itta Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1918” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1986). On the German-Jewish press generally, see the essays in Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte: Dokumente,

Notes to Chapter Three Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen, vol. 1, Identität, Nation, Sprache: Jüdische Geschichte und jüdisches Gedächtnis; Der Westen im Osten, der Osten im Westen; Konzepte jüdischer Kultur (Bremen: Lumière, 2008); and especially, in this same volume, Michael Nagel, “‘Sie gerieten nicht in Verzweiflung’: Zum historischen Erzählen in der deutsch-jüdischen Presse zwischen 1837 und 1939,” 143–62. 6.  For a bibliography, see Walter Jacob, “A Bibliography of Novels and Short Stories by German Jewish Authors,” Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 6 (1962– 64): 75–92. 7.  In addition to Horch, Auf der Suche, 153–61, see Jacob Toury, “Jüdische Buch­händler und Verleger vor 1861,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 9 (1960): 58–65. 8.  Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 1847– 1871: Zwischen Revolution, Reaktion und Emanzipation (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977): 157–58. 9.  Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866 (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 220. 10.  Alphabetische Liste der Förderer der israelitischen Literatur als Abonnenten des Instituts zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur in seinem zwölften Jahre vom 1. Mai 1866 bis 1. Mai 1867 (Leipzig: Leiner, 1867). See the discussion of the institute in Horch, Auf der Suche, 153–64. 11.  Phöbus Philippson, “Die Marannen: Novelle aus dem letzten Jahrzehnt des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 1 (1837): 6ff., 17–20, 30–32, 37–39, 53ff., 65–68, 74ff., 94ff., 106ff., 121–24, 133–35, 149–51, 169–72, 177–80, 201–4, 210–12, 233–36, 249–51, 262–64, 305–7, 314ff., 329–31. Reprinted in book form in Saron, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Leipzig: Leiner, 1855). Compare the discussion of Philippson’s novella in Horch, Auf der Suche, 131–39. 12.  On Heine’s research on the Abarbanels, see Manfred Windfuhr’s commentary in DHA, 5: 578–83. On the historical Isaac Abravanel, see Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972). On the popular image of Isaac Abarbanel in Jewish culture, see Jean-Christophe Attias, Don Isaac Abravanel: La mémoire et l’esperance (Paris: Cerf, 1992); and Jonathan Skolnik, “Die seltsame Karriere der Familie Abarbanel,” in Aufklärung und Skepsis: Internationaler Heine-Kongreß 1997 zum 200. Geburtstag, ed. Joseph A. Kruse, Bernd Witte, and Karin Füllner (Stuttgart: Metz­ ler, 1999), 322–33. 13.  Manfred Windfuhr’s conclusion in DHA, 5: 620, is based on Horch, Auf der Suche, 139. 14.  Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen, in Saron, 1: 28; my trans. 15.  This translation is from The Marannos: A Novel; Translated from the German of Dr. Ludwig [sic!] Philippson by Isidore Koplowitz (Philadelphia: Levytype, 1898), 38. 16.  The second (1541) and third (1545) editions of the Dialoghi d’amore wrongly identify Judah Abravanel as a convert, which may have been the source of his ambivalent image. See s.v. “Abrabanel, Judah,” Encyclopedia Judaica 2: 109–11. For

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Notes to Chapter Three a translation of Judah Abravanel’s poem see “A Complaint Against the Times,” translated from the Hebrew by Dan Almagor, Barbara Garvin, and Dan Jacobson, in The Golden Chain: Fifty Years of the Jewish Quarterly, ed. Natasha Lehrer (London: Mitchell, 2003), 98–106. 17.  On Judah Abravanel’s life and thought contrasted with his father’s, see Seymour Feldman, Philosophy in a Time of Crisis: Don Isaac Abravanel, Defender of the Faith (New York: Routledge Courzon, 2003); and Feldman, “1492: A House Divided,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391–1648, ed. Benjamin R. Gampel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 38–58. On Judah Abravanel’s philosophical context, see Giuseppe Veltri, “Leone Ebreo’s Concept of Jewish Philosphy,” in Jewish Philosophy in Renaissance Garb: Foundations and Challenges in Judaism on the Eve of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 60–72. 18.  Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 5 (1841): 7–8. 19.  Shulamit Volkov has argued that German-Jewish historiography as a whole continues the tradition of historia magistra vitae, which, as Reinhart Koselleck has shown, is abandoned with the advent of modern historicism. See Shulamit Volkov, Die Erfindung der Tradition: Zur Entstehung des modernen Judentums in Deutschland (Munich: Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, 1992), 17–18. 20.  The mainstream Jewish world was slow in claiming Heine as a “culture hero.” Horch outlines the deferred celebration of Heine in the AZJ: see Horch, Auf der Suche, 104–15. See also Mark H. Gelber, ed., The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine (Tübingen: Niemayer, 1992). 21.  Jacob Katz, Die Entstehung der Judenassimilation in Deutschland und deren Ideologie (Frankfurt am Main: Droller, 1935), 32. Reprinted in Jacob Katz, Emancipation and Assimilation: Studies in Modern Jewish History (Farnborough, England: Gregg International Publishers, 1972), 236. 22. Volkov, Die Erfindung der Tradition, 12–13, 23. 23.  Compare the discussion in Nitsa Ben-Ari, “The Historical Novel for Youth: In Search of National Identity Via the Adaptation of a New Genre,” in Internationale Aspekte der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, ed. Hans-Heino Ewers (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994), 72–78. Ben-Ari focuses on how German-Jewish minority culture sowed the seeds of a new national identity that would emerge toward the end of the nineteenth century. 24.  Anna Kazumi Stahl, “Order and Displacement in the House of the Nation: Minority Discourse in Three National Contexts” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995), 1. 25.  Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Movements in Franz Kafka’s Fin-de-siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 26.  For a survey and critique of the vast historiographical literature on Jewish assimilation in Germany, see David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and their Application to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 35 (1990): 17–33.

Notes to Chapter Three 27.  Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse: What Is to Be Done?” introduction to The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), 1, 2. 28.  Compare Arlene Akiko Teraoka’s discussion of Turkish-German writers’ use of literary tradition in “Gastarbeiterliteratur: The Other Speaks Back,” in N ­ ature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. JanMohamed and Lloyd, 317. 29.  Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 139–70. 30.  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture, 86. An alternative sociological application of Freud’s category to questions of minority identity is Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991). The limitation of Bauman’s study of German Jewry for an analysis of minority culture is its exclusive “ontogenetic” focus on leading intellectuals such as Heine and Herzl, side-stepping the question of the culture of the minority collective. 31.  Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, “State and Real Estate: Territoriality and the Modern Jewish Imagination,” in Terms of Survival: The Jewish World Since 1945, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (London: Routledge 1995), 438–39. 32.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 125–27. 33.  Bourdieu’s terms “symbolic capital” and “cultural capital” are defined and differentiated in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 34.  See George Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation Between Bildung and Respectability,” in The Jewish Response to German Culture: From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, ed. Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1985), 1–16. 35.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado: Geschichtlicher Roman aus der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Leiner, 1867), 51–52. 36.  On Goethe’s and Schiller’s interest in the history of the Netherlands, see the essays in Otto Dann, Norbert Oellers, and Ernst Osterkamp, eds., Schiller als Historiker (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995). 37.  On German-Jewish as well as Ladino fictionalizations of the historical material, see Michael Studemund-Halévy, “Wie Wien zu seinen Sefarden kam: Die wundersame Geschichte des Diego de Aguilar,” David 84 (2010): 36–38; also www. hagalil.com/archiv/2010/07/26/sefarden (accessed October 1, 2010). On the publication history of Lehmann’s novel, see Jonathan M. Hess, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 36 and 219 n. 41. See also the interpretive analysis of Die Familie y Aguilar in Florian Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien ­Wunschautobiographien: ­Marranenschicksal im deutsch-jüdischen historischen Roman (Würzburg: Königs­ hausen und Neumann, 2002), 73–86.

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Notes to Chapter Three 38.  Marcus Lehmann, Die Familie y Aguilar (Zurich: Morascha, 1990), 146; my trans. 39.  On the Kulturkampf, see Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). On interreligious relations in nineteenth-century Germany, see Helmut Walser Smith, ed., Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (New York: Berg, 2001); Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany: Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press 1975); and also Ellen Corell Evans, The German Center Party, 1870–1933 (Carbondale: South Illinois University Press, 1981), 40. 40.  For information on anti-Catholic views in German literature on Spain, see Baerbel Becker-Cantarino, “Die ‘schwarze Legende’: Zum Spanienbild in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 92:2 (1975): 183–203. 41.  Arthur Stahl, Die Tochter der Alhambra: historischer Roman in drei Büchern (Berlin: Janke, 1869), 3: 174. Olaf Blasche, following Günther Hirschmann, mistakenly asserts that German-Jewish historical novelists had no share in contemporary German discourse on Catholicsm. (Hirschmann neglects to consider novels by Lehmann, Philippson, etc.) Cf. Olaf Blaschke, Offenders or Victims? German Jews and the Causes of Modern Catholic Antisemitism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 100; and Günther Hirschmann, Kulturkampf im historischen Roman der Gründerzeit, 1859–1878 (Munich: Fink, 1978). 42.  See Michael A. Meyer and Michael Brenner, eds., German-Jewish History in Modern Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3: 181–82. 43.  Ludwig Philippson, “Das Verhältnis des Judenthums zur protestantischen Kirche,” Weltbewegende Fragen in Politik und Religion: Aus den letzten dreißig Jahren, pt. 2 (Leipzig: Baumgärtners Buchhandlung, 1869), 341. A thoughtful, balanced assessment of Jewish positions in relation to the Kulturkampf is found in Alexander Joskowicz, “Liberal Judaism and Confessional Politics of Difference in the German Kulturkampf,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (2005): 177–97. 44.  Philippson, “Das Verhältnis des Judenthums,” 340. 45.  Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 56–58. See also Henry Wassermann, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978): 47–60. Jonathan Hess elaborates on the aesthetics of the “middlebrow,” in Middlebrow Literature. 46. Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). See also Maria T. Baader, “From ‘the Priestess of the Home’ to ‘the Rabbi’s Brilliant Daughter’ Concepts of Jewish Womanhood and Progressive Germanness in Die Deborah and the American Israelite, 1854–1900,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 43 (1998): 47–66, esp. 61. 47.  Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (New York: Bantam, 1988), 431.

Notes to Chapter Three 48. On the relation between bourgeois tragedy play, bourgeois sentimental drama, and melodrama, see Lothar Fietz, “On the Origins of the English Melodrama in the Tradition of Bourgeois Tragedy and Sentimental Drama,” in Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 83–102. 49.  See Arthur Erloesser, Das bürgerliche Drama: Seine Geschichte im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Geneva: Slatkine Reprint, 1970); and Karl Guthke, “Das bürger­ liche Drama des 18. und des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Handbuch des deutschen Dramas, ed. Walter Hinck (Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1980), 76–92. 50.  Hermann Reckendorf, Die Geheimnisse der Juden, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Gerhard, 1856–57), 1: 13; my trans. 51.  Dan Miron argues persuasively that the nineteenth-century German-­Jewish historical novel, with its predilection for Sephardic themes, tended to neglect the theme of kiddush ha-shem and the symbolic value of the religious tradition of martyrdom in medieval Germany—something which Hebrew writers before the 1880s approved of, yet intuitively returned to. See Dan Miron, Ashkenaz: Modern Hebrew Literature and the Pre-Modern German Jewish Experience, Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 33 (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1989). A comprehensive study of the image of kiddush ha-shem and its role in the history of Jewish mentality in the modern period would expand Miron’s thesis and relate it to the central and eastern European Jews’ evolving image of the Sephardim, which (as in this passage) is occasionally tinged with the ethos of kiddush ha-shem, complicating any notion of a universal “myth of Sephardic supremacy.” Compare Philippson, Die Marannen, 15. An extended presentation of Ashkenasic kiddush ha-shem during the Crusades is found in Reckendorf, Die Geheimnisse der Juden, 4: 14–92. On the question of how conceptions of martyrdom distinguish Reckendorf’s novel from other German-Jewish novels and their Hebrew adaptations, compare also Nitsa Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit: Der deutsch-jüdische historische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer neuen jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), who characterizes Reckendorf as a representative of “extreme Reform ideology” on these grounds—something not borne out by my reading of Die Geheimnisse der Juden. See my review of Ben-Ari in AJS Review 23:2 (1999): 145–47. 52. Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 342. 53.  On the historical “Rabbi Uri of Emden” (Uri Halevi, an Ashkenazic rabbi who came to Amsterdam to serve the new community of conversos), see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 43–46. 54. Philippson, Die Marannen, 8. 55. Reckendorf, Die Geheimnisse der Juden, 5: 173–74. 56. Ibid., 175; my trans. 57. Ibid., 174. 58.  See W. Gunther Plaut, The Growth of Reform Judaism (New York: World

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Notes to Chapter Three Union of Progressive Judaism, 1965); and Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 59. Reckendorf, Die Geheimnisse der Juden, 5: 3. 60. Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern ­Judaism (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 73. 61. Ibid., 81. 62. Philippson, Die Marannen, 90–91. 63. Ibid., 91–93. 64.  Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, trans. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 1976), 63. 65.  Franz Brümmer, Lexikon der deutschen Dichter des 19. Jahrhunderts, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Reclam, 1895). Only the third edition (1988) of the Deutsches LiteraturLexikon contains an entry on one of the authors treated in this chapter (Ludwig Philippson), symptomatic of a nonreception of Jewish minority culture. Wilhelm Kosch et al., eds., Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon: Biographisches-Bibliographisches Handbuch, 18 vols. (Bern: Franke, 1988), 11: 1258. 66.  Julian Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, 5 vols. (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1886–96), 5: 455. Schmidt sees Heine and Auerbach as the founders of the genre of “ghetto stories,” which he lauds for “opening new unknown fields to German Bildung.” 67.  Rudolf Gottschall, Die deutsche Nationalliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts (Breslau: Eduard Trewendt, 1872) (3rd ed.) and 1902 (7th ed.). Gottschall’s nationalist literary history attributes a corrosive, unartistic quality to the “Jewish spirit” (3rd ed., 2: 268–69). Antagonistic to Jewish “particularism,” liberal German cultural nationalism could employ the vocabulary of anti-Semitism, as the “dissonance” of Heine’s Hebräische Melodien is contrasted with the “harmony” of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (3rd ed., 2: 78). Gottschall sees only the exotic in Kompert’s ghetto stories, delivering a backhanded compliment: “Es ist dem Autor gelungen, diese geistig starre Welt für uns zu beleben, das allgemein Menschliche in diesen socialen Versteinerungen hervorzuheben [The author has successfully made this spiritually stagnant world come alive, showing what is universal and human in this fossilized society]” (3rd ed., 4: 361). 68.  Heinrich Kurz, Geschichte der neuesten deutschen Literatur von 1830 bis auf die Gegenwart, 4 vols., 4th ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881). 69. Ibid., 4: 351a. 70. Ibid., 4: 57a, 686a–687a. 71. Quoted in Ludwig Philippson, Die Drei Nationen: Für die israelitische J­ugend herausgegeben von I. Herzberg (Leipzig: Kaufmann, n.d.), inside cover. 72. Reckendorf’s Die Geheimnisse der Juden does not seem to have been reviewed beyond Jewish newspapers. See AZJ 22 (1858): 201. 73.  Compare Heine’s understanding of Walter Scott, DHA, 7: 220, and the discussion in Manfred Windfuhr, “Der Erzähler Heine: ‘Der Rabbi von Bacherach’

Notes to Chapter Three als historischer Roman,” in Heinrich Heine: Ästhetisch-politische Profile, ed. Gerhard Höhn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 276–94. 74.  Anonymous review of Die Juden und die Kreuzfahrer in England unter Richard Loewenherz, by Eugen Rispart, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung 64 (March 5, 1842): 260. 75. Anonymous review of Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, by Marcus Lehmann, Deutsche Roman-Zeitung 15 (1872): 227. 76. On the affair, see Walter Boehlich, Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1965). 77.  A comparison of reviews of M. Kayserling’s historical work Sephardim: Romanische Poesien der Juden in Spanien (1859) and a new edition of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (1860) in Westermann’s Monatshefte illustrates the liberal German nationalist perception of the Jewish minority. Without specifically mentioning Fichte’s anti-Jewish diatribes, the reviewer declares that Fichte is “outdated” and that unity should be the goal of “the entire German nation.” See Westermann’s Monatshefte 42 (March 1860): 622. Kayserling, on the other hand, is criticized for writing Jewish history in isolation from its non-Jewish national context, which the reviewer views as the result of a separatism which subverts a German-Jewish identity. The reviewer for this mainstream German cultural journal admonishes restraint for Jewish minority culture in its criticism of Christianity, calling Kayserling’s indictment of the Inquisition too one-sided [!] and lacking a universal humanist perspective. See Westermann’s Monatshafte 38 (November 1859): 214–15. 78.  Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte, ed. Monika Richarz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Anstalt/Leo Baeck Institute, 1976–82). 79.  Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Heines Fragment “Der Rabbi von B ­ acherach”: Eine kritische Studie (Munich: Kastner & Callwey, 1907), 113 n. 307; my trans. 80.  Victor Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae: Erinnerungen eines Philologen, 1881– 1918, 2 vols., ed. Walter Nowojski (Berlin: Ruetten and Loening, 1989). 81. Ibid., 1: 10. 82.  Victor Klemperer, LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990); my trans. 83.  According to the 1866–67 subscription list, he received the publications of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitschen Literatur. 84. Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 1: 17. 85. Ibid., 1: 174–82 86.  Apparently, the romance between Spinoza and Olympia van der Ende, which Auerbach portrays in the novel, did make an significant impression on some readers. In his memoirs of the early 1840s, the German-Jewish writer David Honig­mann (b. 1821) refers to a popular young woman as “eine zweite Olympia van der Ende, die jungen Spinozas mit der lieblichen Zauber ihrer schwarzen Augen zu bannen wußte [a second Olympia van der Ende, who knew how to enchant young Spinozas with the lovely magic of her black eyes].” See Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 7 (1904): 147–48.

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Notes to Chapter Three 87. Klemperer, Curriculum Vitae, 2: 56. 88. Ibid., 2: 485. 89.  On the distinct but interrelated Hebrew- and Yiddish-language reading publics in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, see Dan Miron, When Loners Come Together: A Portrait of Hebrew Literature at the Turn of the Century (in Hebrew) (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1987). 90.  Shmuel Feiner, Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Portland, Oreg.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2002), 234–40. 91.  Nitsa Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit: Der deutsch-jüdische historische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer neuen jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006); and Ben-Ari, “1834. The Jewish Historical Novel Helps to Reshape the Historical Consciousness of German Jews,” in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 143–51. 92.  AZJ 38 (1874): 467–71. See the discussion in Horch, Auf der Suche, 159–61. 93.  Harold Hammer-Schenk, Synagogen in Deutschland: Geschichte einer Baugattung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hans Christians, 1981). 94.  Michael Meyer’s observation that the Moorish style was “abandoned” in response to ant-Semitism is thus too strongly worded. Cf. Meyer, German-Jewish History in Modern Times, 2: 329. 95.  Ivan Kalmar, “Moorish Style: Orientalism, the Jews, and Synagogue Architecture,” Jewish Social Studies 7:3 (Spring–Summer 2001): 68–100. 96. Lehmann, Die Familie y Aguilar; Lehmann, Eine Sedernacht in Madrid (Mainz: Wirth, 1894). 97.  Ludwig Philippson, Gesammelte Schriften (Breslau: Schlesische Buchdrückerei, 1891–92). 98.  See Jacob Borut, “Vereine für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 41 (1996):89–114; and Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), esp. 71–80 and 132–42. 99.  Akademischer Verein für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, III Semesterbericht des akademischen Vereins für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur in Berlin (Berlin: Mueller, 1887). 100. Karpeles, Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur, 2: 1132–36. Karpeles succeeded Ludwig Philippson as editor of the AJZ in 1889. 101.  Moritz Levin, Iberia: Ein Buch der Erinnerung zur Feier des Jahres 1492 (Berlin: Schildberger, 1892). 102. Ibid., 38. 103.  K. (Karpel) Lippe, Die Austreibung der Juden aus Spanien am 9. Ab 5252

Notes to Chapters Three and Four (1. August 1492): Ein Vortrag gehalten im Tempel “Beth Iacob” zu Jassy am Vorabende des 9. Ab 5652 (Jassy: Buch und Steindruckerei H. Goldner, 1892). 104.  Ivan Kalmar, in his otherwise admirable study of Moorish style architecture, neglects the integrationist, diasporist Orientalism of liberal Jews such as Ludwig Philippson and Moritz Levin, and thus argues too strongly that the later assertive “Orientalist Zionism” of figures like Martin Buber is anticipated by midnineteenth century German-Jewish Sephardism. Cf. Kalmar, “Moorish Style.” 105.  J. S. (Josef Samuel) Bloch, Die Juden in Spanien: Eine historische Skizze: In Bruchstuecken vorgetragen im historischen Seminar der Muenchener Universitaet (Leipzig: Leiner, 1875), 127. 106. Maximilian Schächter, “Assimilation,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 9 (1906): 119. 107.  Nossig was executed by the Jewish underground in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, and has been a controversial figure within the Zionist movement. See the balanced study by Shmuel Almog, “Alfred Nossig: A Reappraisal,” Studies in Zionism 7 (1983): 1–29. On the context of German-language Zionist literature around 1900, see Mark H. Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Niemayer, 2000). 108.  Alfred Nossig, Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes (Berlin: Steinitz, 1906), 6. 109. Ibid., 8.

Chapter Four: German Modernism and Jewish Memory 1.  For theoretical perspectives on modernism and historical fiction, especially in relation to Weimar literature, see Harro Müller, “Schreibmöglichkeiten historischer Romane,” Germanic Review 69 (1994): 15–19; Bettina Hey’l, ­Geschichtsdenken und literarischer Moderne: Zum historischen Roman in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994); and Moritz Baßler et al., Historismus und literarische Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), esp. 242–44, 251 on Lasker-Schüler. 2.  Itta Shedletzky, “Bacherach and Barcelona: On Else Lasker-Schüler’s Relation to Heine,” in The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine, ed. Mark H. Gelber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 113–26. 3.  See Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur: Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums,” 1837–1922 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985), 104–15. 4.  Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Heines Fragment “Der Rabbi von Bacherach”: Eine kritische Studie (Munich: Kastner & Callwey, 1907); and Gustav Karpeles, Heinrich Heine und der Rabbi von Bacherach (Vienna: “Freien Blattes,” 1895), 33 n. 40. 5.  Heinrich Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacharach: Fortgesetzt und vollendet von Max Viola (Berlin: Cronbach, 1913). 6.  Ludwig Geiger, “Heinrich Heine: Der Rabbi von Bacherach,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 78:6 (June 2, 1914): 65–66.

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Notes to Chapter Four 7.  For an overview of illustrated Heine editions, see Horst Bunke and Gert Klitzke, Illustrationen zu Heinrich Heine (Leipzig: Deutsche Bücherei, 1972). 8.  Heinrich Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach (Mit Holzschnitten von Joseph Budko) (Berlin: Euphorion, 1921). 9.  Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken, 1973), 191. Kafka and Lasker-Schüler met briefly, in March 1913. See Kafka’s note to Kurt Wolff in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken, 1977), 95. 10.  On the aesthetics of the Jewish cultural renaissance, see Paul MendesFlohr, “Fin-de-siècle Orientalism, the Ostjuden, and the Aesthetics of Jewish Self-Affirmation,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 1 (1984): 96–139; Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Mark Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000). 11.  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986), 19. 12. Ibid., 18, 19. 13.  Citations from the German are from Else Lasker-Schüler, Werke und Briefe: Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Norbert Oellers, Heinz Rölleke, and Itta Shedletzky, im Auftrag des Franz Rosenzweig-Zentrums der Hebräischen Universität Jerusalem, vol. 4, pt. 1 (Prosa 1921–1945. Nachgelassene Schriften. Bearbeitet von Karl Jürgen Skrodzki and Itta Shedletzky) (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2001). Pages and line numbers from the Kritische Ausgabe (critical edition) will be noted parenthetically in the text (page, line number). After the page number and line from the Kritische Ausgabe, I have also provided in italics the corresponding page number from Else Lasker-Schüler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Munich: Kösel, 1962). English translations are by Ritchie Robertson (unless other­ wise noted) from Robertson, ed., The German-Jewish Dialogue: An Anthology of Literary Texts, 1749–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 224–32. Page numbers from Robertson’s translation will be given parenthetically in the text following the English translation. 14.  See the discussion in Shedletzky, “Bacherach and Barcelona.” 15. Jacob Hessing, Else Lasker-Schüler: Biographie einer deutsch-jüdischen Dichterin (Karlsruhe: von Loeper, 1985), 144. On Lasker-Schüler’s relation to the “Neue Gemeinschaft” and to Landauer, see Sigrid Bauschinger, Else LaskerSchüler: Ihr Werk und ihre Zeit (Heidelberg: Lothar Stiehm, 1980), 33, 61–64. 16.  See Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (­Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 17.  Heinrich Heine, DHA, 5: 111. 18.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado: Geschichtlicher Roman aus der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Leiner, 1867), 342. 19.  Dieter Bänsch, Else Lasker-Schüler: Zur Kritik eines etablierten Bildes (Stutt-

Notes to Chapter Four gart: Metzler, 1971), 174–75. Lasker-Schüler’s two-fold mythologization of Sephar­ dic Jewry in her family history and in her fiction is a further parallel with Heine. See Philipp Veit, “Heine: The Marrano Pose,” Monatshefte 66:2 (1974): 145–56. 20.  Max Nordau, for example, claimed that he was descended from the Abravanel clan, and that this “dark atavism” might explain his enthusiasm for Herzl and Zionism. See Max Nordau, Erinnerungen (Vienna: Renaissance, 1928), 12–13. 21.  Heinrich Graetz, Volkstümliche Geschichte der Juden (Leipzig: Leiner, 1889), 3: 501–47. See also Graetz, Geschichte der Juden (Leipzig: Leiner, 1900), 11: 95–100. For a critique of Graetz, see Simon Dubnow, Geschichte des Chassidismus (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1931), 1: 302–3. 22.  Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 121–38. 23.  For an interpretation of Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona as a utopian vision of reconciliation between German Christians and German Jews, see Sonja M. Hedgepeth, “Überall blicke ich nach einem heimatlichen Boden aus”: Exil im Werk Else Lasker-Schülers (New York: Lang, 1994), 139. 24.  For Buber’s presentation of Hasidic “heart-searching” and ecstatic spirituality (hitlahavut) see Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, trans. Maurice Friedman (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1988), 66–75, 122–29. 25.  Martin Buber, On Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1967), 76. 26. Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture, 129–52. 27.  On the centrality of Kafka’s understanding of Yiddish for his evolving modernist style, see Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 28. Buber, On Judaism, 77. 29.  Alfred Nossig, Abarbanel: Das Drama eines Volkes (Berlin: Steinitz, 1906). Nossig (1864–1943), born in Poland, was a writer, sculptor, and Zionist activist. He was a somewhat controversial figure within the Zionist movement and his execution by the Jewish underground in the Warsaw ghetto has made him all the more so. See the balanced study by Shmuel Almog, “Alfred Nossig: A Reappraisal,” Studies in Zionism 7 (1983): 1–29. On Nossig’s historical drama, see Jonathan Skolnik, “Die seltsame Karriere der Familie Abarbanel,” in Aufklärung und Skepsis. Heinrich Heine zum 200. Geburtstag, ed. Joseph A. Kruse, Bernd Witte, and Karin Füllner (Stuttgart: Metzler 1998), 322–33. 30.  The declaration by Lasker-Schüler’s miracle rabbi—“Unerforschlich sind die Wege des Ewigen” (16, 37–17, 1/503)—is given in Hebrew, although it is misprinted in the Gesammelte Werke (2: 503) as ‫ אין תקר‬By contrast, ‫( אין חקר‬lit. “unfathomable”), as it says in the original 1921 Cassier-Verlag edition, and correctly in the Kritische Ausgabe, is a reference to God’s unfathomable greatness found in Psalm 145:3 and Job 5:9. 31.  On the double understanding of “homeland” as terrestrial nomadism and transcendent eternity in Lasker-Schüler’s work, see the informative presentation

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Notes to Chapter Four in Alfred Bodenheimer, Die auferlegte Heimat: Else Lasker-Schülers Emigration in Palästina (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995). 32.  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 25–26. 33. Mark M. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Hapsburg Fin-de-siècle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 194–216. 34. Hessing, Else Lasker-Schüler, 80–81; my trans. 35.  Quoted in ibid., 81. For the entire exchange, which took place in January 1914, see Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzehnten (vol. 1: 1897–1918), ed. Grete Schaeder (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider 1972), 353–55; and Lieber gestreifter Tiger: Briefe von Else Lasker-Schüler, ed. Margarete Kupper (Munich: Kösel, 1969), 1: 116–29. 36.  Judy Atterholt, “Gender, Ethnicity, and the Crisis of Representation in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Early Poetry and Prose” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1993), 118. Compare the balanced discussion of Lasker-Schüler’s letter in Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler, 168–69. 37.  Heather Valencia, Else Lasker-Schüler and Abraham Nochem Stenzel: Eine unbekannte Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1995). 38. Ibid., 72, 114. 39. A.S. [Abraham Stenzel], “Der Idisher ‘Prinz von Theben’” (Yiddish), Haynt, February 19, 1926, 6. This extended essay is not mentioned in Valencia’s study. Because the Yiddish reception of Lasker-Schüler has not been considered in the relevant literature (cf. Calvin N. Jones, The Literary Reputation of Else LaskerSchüler: Criticism, 1901–1993 (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1994), I offer here a synopsis of Stenzel’s main points. Written on the occasion of Lasker-Schüler’s fiftieth birthday, Stenzel’s essay situates the poetess in the Berlin bohème. He understands her work as rarely exhibiting closure, says she is “not a master of prose form,” and calls her stories “intimate, like family chronicles.” Stenzel praises her poetry, which he characterizes as both full of Jewish pathos (literally: “the Jewish oy and vey”) and “with the dividedness [tserissenheit] of all modern humans.” He calls her “homesickness [heimatsveh], touching in a human way.” Stenzel tells Yiddish readers that Lasker-Schüler’s poems recall “moments of the Song of Songs,” and finds in her fantasy world an antidote to modern life. “Life is gray, let us play prince and princess,” Stenzl concludes. 40.  Albatros 3–4 (1923): 29. 41.  Brenner, for instance, in his history of the Jewish cultural revival in Weimar Germany, notes in passing Lasker-Schüler’s participation in a lecture series at the Breslau Jewish Volkshochschule. Brenner, Renaissance, 96. 42. Lasker-Schüler, Werke und Briefe, 1: 316–17; my trans. 43.  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 26. 44. Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler, 183–84. 45.  On representations of Yiddish or pseudo-Yiddish in German literature, see Matthias Richter, Die Sprache jüdischer Figuren in der deutschen Literatur (1750– 1933) (Göttingen: Walstein, 1995).

Notes to Chapter Four 46.  Cited in Brenner, Renaissance, 137. 47.  Uri Zvi Greenberg, “Deborah in Captivity” (Hebrew), Davar (February 26, 1926), quoted in Hessing, Else Lasker-Schüler, 137. 48.  Alice Jacob-Loewenson, “In den Sprachen beten, die wie Harfen eingeschnitten sind,” Jüdische Rundschau 27 (1922): 509. 49.  Ibid. Jacob-Loewenson briefly discusses Der Wunderrabbiner von Barce­ lona, finding in Eleasar’s “erotic mysticism” the antidote to the “Golusjude” (exile-Jew). Rather than confirming essential features of Lasker-Schüler’s work, a reception history illustrates instead how a politically fractured German-Jewish community used Lasker-Schüler to project their own views. Based on an analysis of content, not style, a critic with obvious integrationist sympathies saw LaskerSchüler’s “Oriental” imagery as only one side of a writer who built “bridges from the traditions of her co-religionists [Glaubensgenossen] to the Germany of her compatriots [Volksgenossen].” Fritz Engel, “Else Lasker-Schüler,” C.V.-Zeitung 25 (November 1932): 485–86. 50.  “Erlosch ihre Erleuchtung” is a pseudo-paronomasia because the words have completely different roots (erlöschen, from the Old High German lescan and IndoGermanic *legh, and Erleuchtung from OHG lioht and Ind.-Ger. *leuk). On biblical paronomasia, see Hermann Reckendorf, Über Paronomasie in den s­emitischen Sprachen (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1909). 51.  See Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutsch­ ung (Berlin: Schocken, 1936). 52.  Mendes-Flohr, “Fin-de-siècle Orientalism.” 53.  On the relation of anti-Semitic stereotypes to conceptions of language, see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 54.  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 25. 55.  Here and below, I rely on the excellent discussion of the concept of ­mamlekhet cohanim in Daniel R. Schwarz, “Kingdom of Priests,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Free Press, 1988), 527–34. 56.  Abraham Geiger, Jüdische Zeitschrift für Wissenschaft und Leben 2 (1863): 210, cited in Schwarz, “Kingdom of Priests,” 528. 57.  Max Wiener, “The Conception of Mission in Traditional and Modern Judaism,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 2–3 (1947–48): 9–24, cited in Schwartz, “Kingdom of Priests.” 58.  On Hasidism and its relation to kabbalah, see Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). On nineteenth-century German Reform Judaism, see Max Wiener, Die jüdische Religion im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (Berlin: Philo, 1933); and Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10–142. 59.  See Gerschom Scholem, Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit: Studien zu

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Notes to Chapter Four Grundbegriffen der Kabbala (Zurich: Rhein, 1962), 77–81. Without referring to Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, Werner Hegglin has argued (problematically) for a philosophical affinity of Lasker-Schüler’s work with Jewish mysticism. See Werner Hegglin, Else Lasker-Schüler und ihr Judentum (Zurich: Juris, 1966). See also the critique of Hegglin in Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler, 166. Bauschinger cautions against casting Lasker-Schüler as a poeta doctus who engaged systematically with theological and philosophical systems. See also Jakob Hessing, Die Heimkehr einer jüdischen Emigrantin: Else Lasker-Schülers mythisierende Rezeption, 1945–1971 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 89–94. 60. Wiener, “Concept of Mission in Judaism,” 19. For examples of these positions, see Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des ­Judentums (Leipzig: Fock, 1919), 314: “The misery of the Jewish people does not begin with their exile, for the loss of the national state is already a condition of messianism. Therein lies the tragedy of the Jewish people in all of its historical profundity. How can a people exist and fulfill its messianic mission when it loses that basic human protection that a state provides for a people? And this is precisely the situation of the Jewish people, and thus must it also be the meaning of Jewish history, even if messianism transforms that meaning.” See also Ludwig Philippson, Gesammelte Abhandlungen (Leipzig: Fock, 1911), 1: 89–103. 61. Bodenheimer, Die auferlegte Heimat, 44. Indeed, Lasker-Schüler did conclude at least one letter (discussing an upcoming reading of Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona) with “bitte schreiben Sie Amram der wilden Judendichterin [please write—Amram the wild Jewish poetess],” but most of her letters, includng those from the period when she wrote and read publically from Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona continue using the “Jussuf” persona. See the discussion of this letter in Markus Hallensleben, Else Lasker-Schüler: Avantgardismus und Kunstinszenierung (Tübingen: Francke, 2000), 219 n. 7. Hallensleben also discusses the self-­metaphorizing aspects of the Amram character. 62.  Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, “Ich war verkleidet als Poet! Ich bin Poetin!!’ The Masquerade of Gender in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Work.” German Quarterly 65 (Winter 1992): 1–17. 63. See the discussion of the parallels in Bauschinger, Else Lasker-Schüler, 180–81. 64.  Here I have altered Robertson’s translation. 65.  Phöbus Philippson, “Die Marannen,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 2 (1837). Phöbus (1807–70) was the brother of rabbi and AZJ editor Ludwig Philippson. Eugen Rispart, Die Juden und die Kreuzfahrer unter Richard Löwenherz, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Kollmann, 1861). Rispart was the pseudonym of Isaac Ascher Francolm (1788–1849), a reform preacher in Königsberg and author of Das rationale Judentum (Leipzig: Friedländer, 1840). 66. See Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representations of Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 48–49; Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women,

Notes to Chapters Four and Five Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81–82; and Deborah Hertz, Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), esp. chapter 7, “Seductive Conversion and Romantic Intermarriage,” 204–50. 67.  See, for example, a typical bibliography of recommended youth literature, “In Sachen der Schullesebibliothek: Liste empfehlenswerter jüdischer Kinder- und Jugendliteratur,” AZJ 16 (1852): 316, 386–87. 68. Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 207. 69.  Grace Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars; or, The Martyr (New York: Appleton, 1851). Translated as Maria Henriquez Morales (Magdeburg: Institut zur Förderung der Israelitischen Literatur, 1860). On Aguilar, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 141–57; and Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (­Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 135–90. 70. Although she does not discuss Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, an analogous understanding of the deliberately destabilizing notion of “community” constructed in Lasker-Schüler’s texts is found in Vivian Liska, When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), 66–85.

Chapter Five: “Where books are burned . . . ” 1.  Heinrich Heine, DHA, 5: 16; my trans. 2. See Hartmut Steinecke, Heinrich Heine im Dritten Reich und im Exil (Düsseldorf: Brandt, 2007), 46 and 46 n. 97. Cf. Dietmar Goltschnigg and Hartmut Steinecke, eds., Heine und die Nachwelt: Geschichte seiner Wirkung in den deutschsprachigen Ländern, vol. 2, 1907–56 (Berlin: Schmidt, 2008), 177 n. 279. There is debate over exactly when Heine’s words in Almansor were first revived in connection with Nazism and the Holocaust. See Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Retroactive Dissimilation: Louis Untermeyer, the ‘American Heine,’” in German Culture in Ninetenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation, ed. Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2005), 211–31, here 231 n. 67. 3.  Heinrich Heine, Der Rabbi von Bacherach: Ein Fragment (Berlin: Schocken/ Jüdischer Verlag, 1937). The 1937 edition of Heine’s historical novel was volume 80 of the Schocken Bücherei and included new illustrations by Ludwig Schwerin (1897–1983), letters by Heine, and other materials related to the book’s genesis, and an interpretive essay by the teacher and literary scholar Erich Loewenthal, who would be murdered in Auschwitz five years later. 4.  On Ludwig Schwerin, see Helmut Brosch, Von Deutschland ins “Land der Väter” (Israel): Menschen, Tiere und Landschaften gesehen von Ludwig Schwerin (Buchen 1897–1983 Ramat Gan) (Buchen/Odenwald: Verein Bezirksmuseum e.V., 1997).

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Notes to Chapter Five 5.  Lutz Lenders, “Zum Problem der Dissimilation,” Völkischer Beobachter, April 25, 1934, 1. This section and the following draws upon my discussion in Jonathan Skolnik, “Dissimilation and the Historical Novel: Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 33 (1998): 225–37. 6.  On the dissimilation debate, see ibid., 228–30; and Guy Miron, “Emancipation and Assimilation in the German-Jewish Discourse of the 1930s,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 48 (2003): 165–89, esp. 178–80. 7. Kurt Loewenstein, “Dissimilation,” Jüdische Rundschau 39:34 (April 27, 1934): 1. Although Loewenstein does not make direct reference to Franz Rosenzweig, Zionists understood Rosenzweig’s concept of dissimilation as equivalent to cultural nationalism. Writing in December 1934 on the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation, Else-Rahel Freund called it a “contribution to ‘the great debate of Assimilation versus Dissimilation,’ which ran ‘like a red thread through all our history’”; Else-Rahel Freund, “Das Prinzip der Buber-Rosenzweigschen Bibelübersetzung,” Jüdische Rundschau 98 (December 7, 1934): 3, quoted in Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 255. 8. Alfred Hirschberg, “Dissimilation oder Assimilation?” CV-Zeitung 13:18 (May 3, 1934): 1. 9.  On Jewish publishing in Germany under Nazism, see Volker Dahm, Das jüdische Buch im dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1979); Ingrid Belke, ed., Marbacher Magazin 25 (1983); Susanne Urban-Fahr, Der Philo-Verlag, 1919–1938: Abwehr und Selbstbehauptung (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001); and Anatol Schenker, Der Jüdische Verlag, 1902–1938: Zwischen Aufbruch, Blüte und Vernichtung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003). 10.  See Christoph Gradmann, Historische Belletristik: Populäre historische Biographien in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1993), on the politics of historical fiction in the 1920s and beyond. On historical fiction by German exiles, see Hans Dahlke, Geschichtsroman und Literaturkritik im Exil (Berlin: Aufbau, 1976); and Hans Vilmar Geppert, Der Historische Roman: Geschichte umerzählt von Walter Scott bis zur Gegenwart (Tübingen: Francke, 2009), 242–70. On the question of the relation of German historical fiction to National Socialism, see Frank Westenfelder, Genese, Problematik und Wirkung nationalsozialistischer Literatur am Beispiel des historischen Romans zwischen 1890 und 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1988). Frank Trommler argues that the specifically National Socialist concept of history—a rejection of historical context in favor of notions of eternal “fate” and essence in individual and collective experience—makes the distinction between “historical fiction” and other literary genres favored by the Nazis problematic. See Trommler, “A Command Performance? The Many Faces of Literature Under Nazism,” in The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change, ed. Jonathan Huener and Francis R. Nicosia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 111–33, here 120. 11.  On Zweig, see Na’ama Scheffi, “The Jewish Expulsion from Spain and the

Notes to Chapter Five Rise of National Socialism on the Hebrew Stage,” Jewish Social Studies 5:3 (Spring– Summer 1999): 82–103. 12.  Yosef H. Yerushalmi, “Diener von Königen und nicht Diener von Dienern”: Einige Aspekte der politischen Geschichte der Juden (Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemans Stiftung, 1995), 47–48. 13.  See Deborah Vietor-Engländer, “Hermann Sinsheimers deutsch-jüdisches Schicksal,” in Zwischen Rassenhaß und Identitätssuche: Deutsch-jüdische literarische Kultur im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. Kerstin Schoor (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010), 285–303; Gert Weber and Rolf Paulus, eds., Hermann Sinsheimer: Schriftsteller zwischen Heimat und Exil (Landau: Pfälzische Verlagsanstalt, 1986); and his memoirs, Hermann Sinsheimer, Gelebt im Paradies: Erinnerungen und Begegnungen (Munich: Pflaum, 1953). 14.  Hermann Sinsheimer et al., eds., An den Wassern von Babylon (Munich: Müller, 1920). 15.  On the Kulturbund, see Michael Brenner, “Jewish Culture in a Modern Ghetto: Theater and Scholarship among the Jews of Nazi Germany,” in Jewish Life in Nazi Germany: Dilemmas and Responses, ed. Francis R. Nicosia and David Scrase (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 170–84; Lily Hirsch, A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany: Musical Politics and the Berlin Jewish Culture League (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 47–48, 230; and Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland, 1933–1941, ed. Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Hentrich, 1992). 16.  Hermann Sinsheimer, Maria Nunnez: Eine jüdische Überlieferung (Berlin: Philo, 1934); Rabbi, Golem und Kaiser (Berlin: Philo, 1935); and Die Abenteuer der Grazia Mendez, which was serialized in the Jüdische Rundschau in 1936. 17.  Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 142. See also Roth, A History of the Marranos, 5th ed. (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1992), 239–40. Roth, following historian Sigmund Seeligman, dismisses the story of Maria Nunnez in England as a legend, but notes that it contains elements of truth. This view is shared by David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 102; and by Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 23–26. 18.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado: Geschichtlicher Roman aus der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Leiner, 1867), 316–18. See my discussion of Philippson’s novel in Chapter 3. 19. Sinsheimer, Maria Nunnez, 202. This and subsequent translations are by me, with the page numbers of the original German edition noted in parentheses within the text. 20.  Florian Krobb offers a survey of German literary images of conversos in Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien -Wunschautobiographien: Marranenschicksal in

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Notes to Chapter Five der deutsch-jüdischen historischen Literatur (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2002), including a discussion of Maria Nunnez, 87–100. 21.  Hermann Sinsheimer, Shylock: The History of a Character or the Myth of the Jew (London: Gollancz, 1947). 22. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also the analysis of Sinsheimer in Lisa Lampert, “‘O My Daughter!’: ‘Die schöne Jüdin’ and ‘Der neue Jude’ in Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez,” German Quarterly 71:3 (Summer 1998): 254–70. 23.  On these and others, see Dietrich Briesemeister, Spanien aus deutscher Sicht (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 110. The novels by Frank and Marcuse were all first published in German by Querido Verlag in Amsterdam. 24.  See Evelyn Juers, House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 166–68. On Kesten, see the essays in Walter Fähnders and Hendrik Weber, eds., Dichter—­ Literatur—Emigrant: Über Hermann Kesten (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005). 25.  Hermann Kesten, Ferdinand und Isabella: Roman (Amsterdam: de Lange, 1936). 26.  Kurt Hiller, Profile: Prosa aus einem Jahrzehnt (Paris: Éditions Nouvelles Internationales, 1938), 236; my trans. 27.  Konrad Heiden, The New Inquisition (New York: Alliance, 1939). Though written in German, this book was only published in English and French translation. 28.  Hiller is apparently referring to Otto Zarek, Moses Mendelssohn: Ein ­jüdisches Schicksal in Deutschland (Amsterdam: Querido, 1936). 29.  On the identity politics of German leftists of Jewish origin, see George Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 55–71. Kurt Hiller’s sharp reaction to any articulation of distinctly Jewish interests within the context of émigré politics is also clear in his intervention in the 1936 debate in the pages of the exile journal Die neue Weltbühne. Before he took his own life in exile, Kurt Tucholsky had launched a radical attack on Judaism as a “deservedly defeated” cause, in a letter to Arnold Zweig, which the Weltbühne reprinted and the Nazi press gleefully seized upon. Hiller not only defended Tucholsky against accusations of “self-hatred” from the Zionist Jüdische Rundschau, but also disparaged Arnold Zweig’s sensitive rejection of Tucholsky’s position. See Hiller, Profile, 85–89; and Ernst Loewy, ed., Exil: Literarische und politische Texte aus dem deutschen Exil, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1979), 265–79. 30.  See, for example, Wolf Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger (Munich: Beck, 1983), 123ff. 31.  See Fritz Hackert, “Die Forschungsdebatte zum Geschichtsroman im Exil: Ein Literaturbericht,” Exilforschung 1 (1983): 367–88. 32.  Cf. Renate Werner, “Transparente Kommentare: Überlegungen zu historischen Romanen deutscher Exilautoren,” in Exilliteratur 1933–1945, ed. Wulf ­ Koepke und Michael Winkler (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 355–94. 33.  Fritz Heymann, Tod oder Taufe: Die Vertreibung der Juden aus Spanien und

Notes to Chapter Five Portugal im Zeitalter der Inquisition, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988), 33; my trans. 34.  Cf. Werner, “Transparente Kommentare,” 367. 35.  Kesten and Heymann frequently discussed their projects in Amsterdam, where Kesten headed the influential German exile press Allert de Lange. See Kesten’s introduction to the second edition of Heymann’s “counterhistory” of Jewish renegades and adventurers. Fritz Heymann, Der Chevalier van Geldern (Cologne: Baeck Institut, 1963), x–xii. 36.  For a related interpretation which sees Kesten’s novel as an illustration of Walter Benjamin’s ideas of history, see Carina de Jonge, “Geschichte als Wiederholung: Darstellungen der Judenverfolgung in Hermann Kestens historischem Roman Ferdinand und Isabella (1936),” in Wiederholen: Literarische Funktionen und Verfahren, ed. Roger Lüdeke and Inka Mülder-Bach (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 161–72. 37.  Hermann Kesten, Ferdinand and Isabella (New York: Wyn, 1946), 234. 38.  One such anti-Semitic account of Sephardic history, aimed at Germanspeaking readers, was Dominik Josef Wölfel, So ist Spanien: Geheimgeschichte eines Bürgerkrieges (Mauer bei Wien: Kühne, 1937), 317–92. For recent assesments of the Franco regime and anti-Semitism, see Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 209–17; and Raanan Rein, In the Shadow of the Holocaust and the Inquisition: ­Israel’s Relations with Francoist Spain (London: Cass, 1997), 85–87. Karl Otten’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, Torquemadas Schatten (Stockholm: Berman-Fischer, 1938), is an example of German antifascist invocations of the Spanish past. 39. Hermann Heinz Ortner, Isabella von Spanien: Schauspiel in drei Akten (Berlin: Zsolnay, 1938); and Hans Rehberg, Die Königin Isabella: Schauspiel in drei Akten (Berlin: Fischer, 1939). See Barbara Panse, “Censorship in Nazi Germany: The Influence of the Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda on German Theater and Drama, 1933–1945,” in Fascism and Theater: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996), 140–56, here 149 and 153. Ortner’s play was one of the most popular German plays of the Nazi era, performed on 250 stages across Germany. See Julia Danielczyk, “Ästhetik und Selbstinszenierung Hermann Heinz Ortners: Der erfolgreichste österreichische Dramatiker der dreißiger Jahre,” in Verspielte Zeit: Österreichisches Theater der dreissiger Jahre, ed. Hilde Haider-Pregler and Beate Reiterer (Vienna: Picus, 1997), 79. The most complete study of Ortner is Julia Danielczyk, Selbstinszenierung: Vermarktungsstrategien des öster­reichischen Erfolgsdramatikers Hermann Heinz Ortners (Vienna: Braumüller, 2003). On Rehberg, see Sonja Grevers, “Hans Rehberg—der Preuße,” in Dichter für das “Dritte Reich”: Biographische Studien zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Ideologie, ed. Rolf Düsterberg (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2009), 197–228. 40.  See Stefan Bauer, Ein böhmischer Jude im Exil: Der Schriftsteller Ernst Sommer (1888–1955) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995); Margarita Pazi, Fünf Autoren des Prager Kreises (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1978).

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Notes to Chapter Five 41.  See the discussion of this novel in Margarita Pazi, Staub und Sterne: ­Aufsätze zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 15. 42.  Ernst Sommer, Die Templer (Berlin: Wolff, 1935). See Jennifer Taylor, “Into Exile: Ernst Sommer in London,” Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies 4 (special issue, Refugees from the Third Reich in Britain, ed. Anthony Grenville) (2002): 135–49, here 137. 43.  Ernst Sommer, Botschaft aus Granada (Mährisch Ostrau: Nachfolger, 1937). 44. Dahm, Das jüdische Buch, 182–83. 45.  Hermann Sinsheimer, “Roman der Austreibung: Ernst Sommers Botschaft aus Granada,” Jüdische Rundschau 42:87 (November 2, 1937): 7. 46.  Ernst Sommer, Botschaft aus Granada (Berlin: Jüdische Buchvereinigung, 1938); see Taylor, “Into Exile,” 137–39. 47.  Ernst Sommer, “Die Folterung,” Pariser Tageszeitung 2:496 (October 22, 1937): 6. 48.  Gerhard Langer, “Ernst Sommers Roman Botschaft aus Granada,” in Versteckter Glaube oder doppelte Identität? Das Bild des Marranentums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Hannah Lotte Lund, and Paola ­Ferruta (Hildesheim: Olms, 2011), 173–98. 49.  In Ortner’s Isabella play, in line with National Socialist racism, the figure of Santangel is especially demonized as a nefarious “hidden” Jewish influence. 50.  Anthony Grenville, “The Earliest Reception of the Holocaust: Ernst Sommer’s Revolte der Heiligen,” German Life and Letters 51:2 (1998): 250–65. 51.  Robert Breuer, “Als Granada fiel: Ernst Sommer, Botschaft aus Granada,” Pariser Tageszeitung/Das neue Buch 3:573 (January 7, 1938): 6. The quote is found in Sommer, Botschaft aus Granada, 341; my trans. 52.  Sinsheimer, “Roman der Austreibung.” 53.  On the Maimonides and Abravanel anniversaries, see Guy Miron, The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 69–70, 76, 79–80. 54.  Alfred Klee, “Die Feiern in den Gemeinden,” Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt Berlin, February 7, 1937, 9. 55.  “Die erste Abravanel-Medaille verliehen,” Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt Berlin (February 7, 1937), 9. 56. James Young, At Memory’s Edge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 156. 57.  Nazi officials regularly looked in the Berlin Jewish Museum’s events and indeed among the forty-seven hundred visitors to the “Unsere Ahnen” exhibit was none other than Adolf Eichmann. The Berlin Jewish Museum mounted four exhibits in 1937. The Abravanel exhibit drew 1,383 visitors. See Verwaltungsbericht des Vorstands der jüdischen Gemeinde zu Berlin für das Jahr 1937 12 (Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York, Herbert Seeliger Collection MF 565, Folder 2). 58.  See Hermann Simon, Das Berliner Jüdische Museum in der Oranienbürger Straße: Geschichte einer zerstörten Kulturstätte (Berlin: Union, 1988), 64; and the

Notes to Chapter Five and Epilogue catalog by Rahel Wischnitzer-Bernstein and Josef Fried, Gedenkausstellung Don Jizchaq Abrabanel: Seine Welt, Sein Werk (Berlin: Lessmann, 1937). On Rahel Wischnitzer, see Katharina Feil, “Rachel Wischnitzer and the Development of Jewish Art Scholarship in the Twentieth Century” (Ph.D. diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1994). For reviews of the exhibit, see Irmgard Schüler, “Die Welt der Abarbanel,” Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt, June 20, 1937, 3; and Olga Bloch, “Abarbanel - Austellung in Berlin,” Central Verein-Zeitung, June 17, 1937, 8. The exhibit was conceived of by Alfred Klee; on the significance of the Abravanel commemoration for Berlin Zionists, see Max Nußbaum, “Abarbanel - der Politiker und der Schriftsteller zu seinem 500. Geburtstag,” Jüdische Rundschau 74 (February 19, 1937): 6, who writes of reviving Abravanel’s image for a new generation “from a nationalist perspective.” 59.  Neil Levi, “‘Judge for yourselves!’: The Degenerate Art Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (1998): 41–64. 60.  Ismar Elbogen, “Don Isaak Abarbanel,” Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt Berlin, February 7, 1937, 9; Leo Strauss, “On Abravanel’s Philosophical Tendency and Political Teaching,” in Isaac Abravanel: Six Lectures, ed. J. B. Trend and H. Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), 93–129; Selig Schachnowitz, Don Jizchak Abarbanels Leben und Lebenswerk (Frankfurt am Main: Herman, 1937). For an expanded bibliography, see Jean-Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel: La mémoire et l’espérance (Paris: Cerf, 1992). 61.  Abraham Joshua Heschel, Don Jizchak Abravanel (Berlin: Reiss, 1937), 29ff. 62.  Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Leipzig: Reclam, 1942), 9–10. See Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 158–60 and 304 n. 32.

Epilogue: Post-Holocaust Echoes 1.  Unpublished letter of Sigmund Seeligmann to Rahel Wischnitzer (June 17, 1937), Rahel Wischnitzer Archive, Terrace Park, Ohio. I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Leonard Winchester for making this private archive available to me. 2.  Gedenkbuch Berlins der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995). 3.  Leo Perutz, Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke, ed. Hans-Harald Müller (Munich: Knaur, 1994), 261–67. This and subsequent translations are mine. 4. Perutz, Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke, 11. 5. Selma Stern, Ihr seid meine Zeugen: Ein Novellenkranz aus der Zeit des Schwarzen Todes 1348/49 (Munich: Müller, 1972), 291–92; my trans. The work was first published in English, in Ludwig Lewison’s translation, as Selma Stern, The Spirit Returneth: A Novel, trans. Ludwig Lewison (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946). Stern notes that the German version was reworked for publication: “I revised the original German manuscript in 1969. I cut many things, especially everything that was very specific to the time when it was written,

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Notes to Epilogue and I modified the language to fit the style of my current age.” Stern, Ihr seid, 293. On Stern, see Marina Sassenberg, Selma Stern (1890–1981): Das Eigene in der Geschichte; Selbstentwürfe und Geschichtsentwürfe einer Historikerin (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), esp. 195–204, on The Spirit Returneth. 6.  Lion Feuchtwanger, Spanische Ballade (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955). 7.  Feuchtwanger rebuilt his private library in exile in California in the 1940s and 1950s (it had twice been seized by the Nazis when he fled in 1933 and 1940), and he took care to acquire works such as Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez, and Kesten’s Ferdinand und Isabella, as well as historical works by Kayserling. 8.  My translation. 9.  Hans Vilmar Geppert, Der “andere” historische Roman: Theorie und Strukturen einer diskontinuierlichen Gattung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976). 10.  Dan Miron, “Modern Hebrew Literature: Zionist Perspectives and Israeli Realities,” What Is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 95–115. 11.  Recent editions in German include Marcus Lehmann, Rabbi Joselmann von Rosheim (Zurich: Morasha, 1988); and Lehmann, Die Familie y Aguilar (Zurich: Morasha, 1990). 12. Robert Menasse, Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). For interpretations of Menasse’s novel, see Florian Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien Wunschautobiographien: Marranenschicksal im der deutschjüdischen historischen Roman (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 127–37; Alfred Bodenheimer, “Hegel und Abarbanel: Zur Metaphorik des Marannentums bei Heinrich Heine und Robert Mensasse,” Jahrbuch des Simon-DubnowInstituts 3 (2004): 113–30; Irmela von der Lühe, “Geschichte als Lehrmeisterin? Robert Menasses Roman Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle,” Akten des XI: Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Paris 2005, ed. Jean-Marie Valentin (= Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, series A, vol. 88) (Bern: Lang, 2007), 251–57; and Margy Gerber, “‘What once was will always be possible’: The Echoes of History in Robert Menasse’s Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle,” in Rebirth of a Culture: Jewish Identity and Jewish Writing in German and Austria Today, ed. Hillary Hope Herzog, Todd Herzog, and Benjamin Lapp (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 2008), 85–99. 13. Menasse, Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle, 144; my trans.

Bibliography

Archival Materials Leo Baeck Institute, Center for Jewish History, New York Herbert Seeliger Collection MF 565, Folder 2. Don Isaac Abravanel Collection, AR 2498. Rachel Wischnitzer Archive, held by Mr. Leonard Winchester, Terrace Park, Ohio Correspondence of Sigmund Seeligmann (uncatalogued).

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Index

Abravanel, Isaac: historical figure, 58, 59 (Figure 7), 65–66; literary depiction, 16; 72–73, 74–75, 85–86, 90, 102, 103, 106, 162, 164, 167–175, 177–178, 206n69, 207n12, 208n17, 227nn60,61; subject of painting, 18, 20, 175 Abarbanel, Isaak (character), 13, 16, 51, 56– 57, 62–65, 71–72, 74, 112 (Figure 13), 134, 144, 163–164, 207n12, 227n60. See also Abravanel, Isaac, literary depiction Abravanel, Jehuda: historical figure, 72–73; literary depiction, 56, 73, 85–86, 205n64 Acosta, Uriel, 31–33, 37, 42, 102 Aggadah, 52, 55. See also Haggadah Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 16, 26, 33, 41, 67, 72, 98, 107, 119, 196n50, 203n37, 206nn1,5, 207n11, 208n18, 215nn3,6, 220n65 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 187n7 Anderson, George K., 24, 191nn5,9, 192nn10,11,14, 196n54 Anti-Semitism, 1, 4, 5, 8, 29, 49–50, 93–97, 100–101, 102–104, 116–118, 135, 149, 155–158, 166, 175, 194n22, 197n56, 201n5, 212n67, 219n53, 225n38 Ashkenaz, 13, 50, 57, 211n51 Ashkenazic culture, 13, 17, 49, 85 Ashkenazic identity, 40, 100 Assimilation, 1–9, 11, 27, 30, 63, 65–66, 75–77, 83, 103, 124–125, 142–143, 145, 149, 157, 168, 187n5, 188nn10,12,13,15, 189n19, 193n15, 200n100, 208nn21,26, 210n46, 215n106, 222nn6,7,8. See also Dissimilation Auerbach, Berthold, 1, 4, 7, 11–13, 43, 67, 102, 106, 114, 158–159, 190n35, 192nn10,13, 193nn14,19, 194nn23,24,25,26,30,31, 195n36; Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, 67;

Spinoza, 23, 25–40, 41, 43, 72, 78, 118, 160, 189n22, 192n12, 193n16 Ben-Ari, Nitsa, 11, 99, 189n18, 208n23, 221n51, 214n91 ben Israel, Menasse, 173, 182 Berlin, 8, 14 (Figure 3), 15 (Figure 4), 20, 25, 45, 94–95, 101–102, 129, 167, 170–174, 177–178, 187n5, 190n35, 213n76, 214n99, 221n66, 226nn54,55,56,57,58, 227n60, 227n2 Bhabha, Homi, 76–77, 209nn29,30 Bildung, 2, 12, 42–43, 50–51, 65, 77–78, 92, 96, 119, 143, 209n34. See also Cultural capital Bildungsroman, 37 Blood libel, 45, 48, 66, 116 Bourgeois culture, 12, 42, 57, 75–77, 78, 83–85, 114–115, 121, 122, 141, 143–144, 157, 211n48. See also Embourgoisement Bourgeois tragedy play, 83–85, 143, 211n48 Buber, Martin, 121–124, 128, 133–134, 140, 217n24, 218n35 Catholicism, 18, 31, 63, 162, 210n41; and German nationalism, 63, 81–82, 210n40; Jewish relationship with, 82, 106–107, 210n39; progressive thought in, 39 Christianity, 7, 9, 18, 25, 27, 32, 34, 40, 48, 64, 82, 88–89, 92, 94, 98, 142, 154, 157, 165, 167, 192n10, 199n77, 210n39, 213n77, 217n23 Classical culture, 63–64, 71, 78–83, 85, 96, 155, 158, 196n56 Cohen, Hermann, 140, 220 Conversion, 27, 37, 42, 50, 64, 71, 73–74, 81–82, 98, 142, 187n5, 193n17, 204n39, 205n67, 221n66

257

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Index Conversos, 154–155, 211n53, 223nn17,20. See also Marranos Convivencia, 4, 20, 81, 170 Cultural capital, 12, 78, 83, 209n33. See also Bildung Cultural memory, 1, 4–5, 8, 12, 16–17, 21, 45–46, 49, 57, 62, 68, 80–81, 87, 91, 100, 102, 105–107, 117–118, 147, 158–161, 165 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 97 Damascus affair, the, 45, 48, 69, 116, 200n1, 206n4 David (king of Israel), 65–66, 85, 128 Davidic line, 88, 90 Deleuze, Gilles, 76, 113, 216n11 Dissimilation: contrasted with assimilation, 4–12, 188n13, 222n8; cultural context of, 67, 70, 77, 80, 97–98, 104, 106, 156, 172, 222n5; defined, 1–2; in Lasker-Schüler’s Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, 8, 106–115; identity and, 17–20, 48–50, 188nn10,14,15, 222nn6,7; in National Socialist propaganda, 5, 9, 147–151, 156, 158, 221n2. See also Assimilation Domestic virtue (in literature), 71–75, 84–85 Elizabeth I of England, 86, 152–153, 155–156 Emancipation, 17, 26–28, 33, 40, 48–49, 60–61, 67, 70, 75–77, 87, 90–92, 118, 188nn11,12, 189n21, 190n31, 193n20, 197n58, 200n3, 202n19, 204n39, 205n67, 208nn21,26, 209n34 Embourgoisement, 1, 6, 7, 70, 76, 114 Enlightenment, 2, 9, 20, 32, 25–29, 33–36, 40–43, 48–50, 63, 72, 75, 78, 81, 90, 93, 97, 114, 118–122, 137, 150, 160, 161, 188nn14,15, 197n61, 198n65, 209n34 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 13, 95, 106, 123, 151, 159–160, 180–181, 213n79, 215n4, 224n30, 228nn6,7 France, 11, 17, 45, 70, 194n31, 226n53 Frankfurt, 50, 66, 111 (Figure 12), 112 (Figure 13) Freytag, Gustav, 68, 92, 195n39 Fünn, Shmuel Josef, 98 Gans, Eduard, 46, 55, 200n3 Geiger, Abraham, 29, 137, 194n30, 219n56 Geiger, Ludwig, 100, 107, 194n30, 215n6 Gender, 71, 82–83, 115, 135–138, 145, 157, 210n46, 216n10, 218n36, 220nn62,66 German high culture, 11, 12, 20, 35, 42–43, 71, 78, 80, 156

German language, 2, 4, 7, 17, 26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 37, 45, 61, 69, 70, 88–89, 119, 121, 128, 131–136, 143–145, 150, 156, 158, 166 German nationalism, 17, 18, 20, 26, 28, 49, 81, 93, 99–107 Ghetto, 13, 57, 65, 71, 75, 97, 130, 197n58, 223n15; in fiction, 13, 16, 43–46, 50–51, 63, 66, 72, 92, 112 (Figure 13), 115, 118, 151, 178, 179, 189n25, 195n35, 196n47, 200n100, 212nn66,67, 215n107 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 17, 36, 42, 84, 189n22, 196nn54,55, 209n36; Dichtung und Wahrheit, 35, 36; Egmont, 63, 79, 81, 118, 155, 161; as German cultural icon, 9–11, 48, 71, 196n51, 197n56; Hermann und Dorothea, 85; and representations of Catholicism, 81; The Wandering Jew, 34–35 Gosche, Richard, 20, 190n36 Guattari, Felix, 76, 113, 216n11 Gutzkow, Karl, 30, 31–35, 38, 40, 42, 94, 160, 189n22, 193n18, 195n44, 196n47 Haggadah, 2, 47, 49, 59 (Figure 7), 64, 65, 203n35, 206n71 “Haggadah” (narrative theme), 46–59, 202n23, 203nn31,32, 205n57 Halacha, 52–53, 202n23 Halevi, Jehudah, 16, 46; literary depiction, 51–54 Hasidim, 28, 120–121, 134, 139 Hasidism, 87, 121, 122–123, 128, 140, 217n24, 219n58 Haskalah, 16, 28, 199n94 Hebrew language, 8, 28, 29, 38, 54, 55, 61, 73, 81, 89, 115, 127–128, 129, 130, 132, 136, 193n21, 196n47, 211n51, 217n30 Hebrew translations of German language literature, 11, 20, 71, 97–99, 132, 181, 182 Heine, Heinrich, 1, 5, 8, 12, 13, 28, 29, 36, 44, 69, 87, 93, 97, 102, 106–122, 169, 172, 178, 200nn1,2, 201nn8,14,15, 202n25, 203n34, 205nn53,57,64, 206n71, 208n20, 212n66, 217n19, 221n2; Der Rabbi von Bacherach, 4, 12, 45–58, 60–67, 71–75, 106, 107–112, 115, 117, 119, 134, 147–148, 177, 179, 201nn8,14, 203n34, 205n57, 212n73 Hep-Hep Riots, 46, 116, 200n3 Hermann, Georg, 100 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 174, 177, 191n36 Hess, Jonathan, 11–12, 200n100, 209n37, 210n45 Historical fiction, 1–11, 16, 20–21, 30–33, 36,

Index 41, 43, 46, 47, 60, 62–63, 67–75, 93, 97– 98, 100, 103, 105–106, 114, 119, 122–123, 148, 150–152, 155, 158–160, 162, 166, 167, 179–182, 189n22, 190n31, 195n37, 198n70, 205n67, 209n37, 215n1, 222n10 Historicism, 2, 4, 57, 105 Holocaust, 1, 2, 16, 169, 175, 180, 182, 183 Inquisition, 1, 4, 5, 9, 17, 20, 32, 37, 38, 42, 79–82, 86, 87, 89, 91, 117,118, 120, 134, 143, 154, 157, 159, 162, 164, 167–170, 173–175, 213n77 Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, 70, 95, 98, 99, 119 Israel, 38, 50, 53, 60, 90, 99, 115, 137, 139, 181 Der Israelit, 69, 98, 101 Jewish cultural renaissance, 6, 8, 122, 216n10 Jewish daughter: as dramatic element, 84, 142–143 Jewish Museum (Berlin), 171–172, 173, 226n57 Jews, eastern European, 6, 7, 13, 16, 18, 40, 97–98, 107, 111 (Figure 12), 114, 121–122, 155, 163, 167, 211n51 Kabbalah, 39, 87, 113, 131, 139–140, 155, 219n58 Kesten, Hermann, 16, 150, 158–166, 177, 224nn24,25, 225nn35,36, 228n7 Kiddush ha-shem (concept), 85, 211n51. See also Martyr Kiefer, Anselm, 175 (Figure 17) Klee, Alfred, 170, 227n58 Klemperer, Victor, 95–97 Kompert, Leopold, 16, 92, 200n100, 212n67 Kulturbund deutscher Juden, 151–152, 156, 223n15 Kulturkampf, 81–82, 107, 210nn39,41,43 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 5, 8, 105, 113, 128–129, 131–135, 150, 215n2, 216n9, 217nn19,23,31, 218n39, 219n49, 220nn59,61, 221n70; Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona, 105–107, 113–127, 135–146, 155, 179 Lehmann, Markus, 4, 7, 11, 12, 69–70, 76, 78, 79–80, 92, 93–95, 98–99, 101, 102, 106, 116, 150, 152, 158, 180, 181–182, 209n37, 210nn38,41, 213n75, 214n96, 228n11 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 20, 28, 34–35, 81, 84–95, 94, 143 Maimonides, 16, 38, 87, 120, 170, 198n75, 226n53

Marranos, 154, 161, 164. See also Conversos Martyr, 49, 54, 80, 84–85, 94, 181, 211n51 Mendelssohn, Moses, 9, 29, 35–36, 89, 99, 120, 159–160 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 9–11, 34 Menasse, Robert, 182–183, 228n12 Middle class, 76, 83, 142, 210n45, 220n66 “Middlebrow” culture, 12, 78, 156 “Minor literature,” 76, 113–114, 123, 127, 131, 136 Minority culture, 4, 8, 11, 21, 28, 31, 44, 66, 67–71, 75–79, 83, 90–104, 106, 114, 119, 122, 152, 153, 189n22, 208n23, 209n30, 212n65, 213n77 Minority literature, 30, 43–44, 71, 76–77, 78, 83, 95, 104, 123, 158 Moorish style, 4, 13, 14 (Figure 3), 15 (Figure 4), 19 (Figure 6), 20, 100–101, 171, 173, 188n8, 214n94, 215n104 Nazi, 1, 5, 43, 68, 96, 147–152, 156, 158–160, 166, 167, 171, 172, 174, 177, 182–183, 222n9, 223n15, 224n29, 225n39, 226n57 Nordau, Max, 97, 217n20 Nossig, Alfred, 5, 8, 16, 103–104, 125, 162, 177, 205n107 Oppenheim, Moritz, 9–12, 16, 100 Orientalism, 20, 188n8, 190n36, 215n104 Orthodox Jews, 5, 8, 69, 101, 103, 125, 182 Perutz, Leo, 16, 178–179 Philippson, Ludwig, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 16, 33, 67, 69–70, 74–76, 78, 82, 86, 92–93, 95, 99–102, 105, 114, 117, 118, 182, 204n50, 212n65, 215n104, 220n65; Jakob Tirado, 79–80, 86–88, 118–122, 140, 143, 152–155, 158 Philippson, Phöbus, 16, 67, 71–73, 93, 116, 134, 144–145, 150, 160, 162; Die Marannen, 72, 73–76, 85–88, 90–92, 103–104, 143, 164, 165–166, 169, 177, 207nn11,15, 211n51 Pogrom, 46, 49, 107, 117, 124, 171 Portugal, 79, 86, 120, 152, 154, 157, 171, 172 Priest (in Judaism), 33, 136–137, 145, 163, 219nn55,56,57 Protestantism, 81, 82 Protestants, 39, 42, 81–82, 96, 106 Rebecca (Ivanhoe character), 64; as literary paradigm, 84, 86 Reckendorf, Hermann, 7, 16, 70, 84, 88–92, 95, 98, 99, 116, 162, 177, 181, 211n51

259

260

Index Reform Judaism, 8, 29, 36, 90, 102, 139 Ring, Max, 68–69 Rispart, Eugen, 93–94, 143, 220n65 Romanticism, 47, 49 Rosenzweig, Franz, 1, 6, 7–8, 133, 149, 222n7

Spinoza, Baruch, 36, 102, 195n40, 197nn59,60, 199n90 Stahl, Arthur, 82 Stahl, Heinrich, 170–171 Szyk, Arthur, 2–3

Salomonski, Martin (Rabbi), 170–171 Samuels, Maurice, 11, 194n31 Schiller, Friedrich, 17, 41, 71, 80–81, 83, 95, 155–156, 209n36 Scholem, Gershom, 56, 91, 189n17, 203n33, 212n64, 219n59 Schorsch, Ismar, 13, 16–17, 36, 87, 90, 187n8, 189n21, 190n29, 191n8, 201nn13,15, 202nn19,20,27 Scott, Sir Walter, 47, 60, 62–64, 84, 93, 95, 117–118, 142, 143, 199n97, 201n9, 204n50, 210n47, 212n73, 222n10 Secularization, 6–7, 12–13, 23, 26–46, 51, 54, 55, 57, 64, 66, 71, 73, 75, 97, 98, 103–104, 154, 155, 195n41 Sephardism, 8, 13–21, 88, 101–104, 107, 151–152, 160, 166, 169–170, 172, 174, 177, 187n8, 190n36, 215n104 Sinsheimer, Hermann, 5, 11, 150, 151–152, 160; Maria Nunnez, 155–158, 165, 170 Sommer, Ernst, 5, 150, 166–171, 177–178, 225n40, 226nn42,43,45–48,50–51 Sorkin, David, 5, 6, 26, 188nn10,12, 192n12, 193n15, 195n41, 197n61, 208n26 Spain, 4, 17, 18, 51, 54, 74, 82, 116, 161–166, 172, 173–174; and German-Jewish history, 62–66, 72, 79, 84, 88, 91, 103, 116, 124, 170–171

Talmud, 38, 52, 89–90 Torquemada, Tomas de, 18–20, 91, 163, 164, 167, 168–169 van Rijn, Rembrandt, 173, 182 Volkov, Shulamit, 6, 76 Wandering Jew, the, 23–27, 30, 33–34, 35–36, 78, 118, 191n10, 192nn11,12,14, 197n56 Weimar era, 5, 8, 24, 106, 115–116, 150 Wischnitzer-Bernstein, Rahel, 172, 177, 227n58 Wissenschaft des Judentums, 2, 12, 13, 18, 40– 41, 45–47, 52, 53, 55–58, 61–62, 76, 94, 100, 102, 117, 187n2, 191n8, 202nn19,27, 203nn33,34 World War I, 8, 97, 107, 116 Yerushalmi, Yosef H., 1, 2, 117, 150, 155 Yiddish, 8, 17, 28–29, 40, 50, 71, 97–99, 123, 127–133, 182 Zionism, 5–8, 71, 97, 99–107, 113, 115, 121, 122, 123–125, 129, 132, 141, 149–153, 158, 167, 168 Zunz, Leopold, 12, 18, 45–47, 55–61, 102, 117