Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity 9780804774239

Citation preview

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture e d i t e d by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity Jonathan M. Hess

stanford u n i ve rs i t y p res s sta n f o rd, ca l i f o rn ia

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professorship in Jewish History and Culture, College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Portions of Chapter 2 were published previously in “Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German-Jewish Ghetto Fiction,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 576–615. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Fictions of Modern Orthodoxy, 1857–1890: Orthodoxy and the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 52 (2007): 49–86. Reprinted with the permission of the Leo Baeck Institute. 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, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hess, Jonathan M., 1965–   Middlebrow literature and the making of German-Jewish identity / Jonathan M. Hess.    p.  cm.—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8047-6122-2 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  German literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism.  2.  German fiction—19th century—History and criticism.  3.  Jewish fiction—19th century—History and criticism.  4.  Jews—Germany—Intellectual life—19th century.  5.  Group identity in literature.  6.  Jews in literature.  I.  Title.  II.  Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture. PT169.H47  2010 833’.7098924—dc22 2009030703

To Beth, Rebecca, Lily, and Amelia

Contents



1.

2. 3. 4.

Acknowledgments

ix

List of Illustrations

xiv

Introduction. When Rabbis Became Novelists: The Emergence of Jewish Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany

1

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition: The Sephardic Legacy and the Making of Middlebrow Classics

26

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past

72

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance: Love, Fiction, and the Virtues of Marrying In

111

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

157

Concluding Remarks

201

Notes

209

Index

251

Acknowledgments

Twenty years ago, when I was in graduate school grappling with the development of German aesthetic thought, it would never have occurred to me that I would someday spend years of my professional life working on a book on hundreds of works of literature that for the most part went entirely under the radar of the literary elites of their era. In retrospect, of course, the trajectory of my scholarly career seems less puzzling. This is largely because I have been fortunate to spend the last sixteen years at an institution which has allowed and encouraged my research and teaching to develop in continually new ways. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I thus owe a tremendous debt to my colleagues in the department of Germanic languages and literatures for creating such a productive, pleasant, and friendly environment in which to teach, work, think, and conduct research. Ruth von Bernuth, Eric Downing, Clayton Koelb, Dick Langston, Anna Parkinson, Kathryn Starkey, and Tin Wegel all deserve to be singled out here. Eric Downing was particularly giving of his time, expertise, and good advice on this project, and his encouragement and critical readings of chapters in draft form were instrumental in enabling me to feel at home writing about the nineteenth century. I owe a similar level of gratitude to my colleagues down the road in the department of Germanic languages and literatures at Duke University. Bill Donahue and Ann Marie Rasmussen both showed tremendous generosity of spirit, time, and critical energy in their responses to my work and in numerous conversations about it, and I thank them as well. I have also profited from my students in important ways. The more than two hundred undergraduates in my lecture course on “German

ix

x

Acknowledgments

Culture and the Jewish Question” cannot be thanked individually, but the challenge of teaching this class brought my thinking about the issues I explore in this book to a new level of clarity. (And perhaps now my students may understand why they were forced to read Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen in an antiquated nineteenth-century translation.) The graduate students in a seminar on the “Quest for the German-Jewish Novel” helped me to zone in on some of the issues I investigate here. I also had the occasion to refine my thinking about the historical novel and the ghetto tale while teaching a graduate seminar on cultures of memory in nineteenth-century Germany. I owe all the graduate students in my department a special thank-you for their intellectual engagement and curiosity and for helping to make our department a place where new ideas are always in the works. I wrote this book while helping to build a new center for Jewish Studies in Chapel Hill, and the experience of trying to create meaningful institutional avenues for interdisciplinary work on campus has also left an important mark on my scholarship. My colleagues in the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies—particularly Yaakov Ariel, Jonathan Boyarin, Chris Browning, Erin Carlston, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Jodi Magness, Evyatar Marienberg, and Yaron Shemer—all deserve thanks for their part in creating a vibrant interdisciplinary community where scholarship such as my own has been able to take on new meaning. As invigorating as creating a new program can be, this book would not have been completed without significant release time from teaching and administrative work. I thus owe a special debt to the College of Arts and Sciences for making it possible for me to devote the academic year 2006–2007 entirely to research and writing. In spring 2007 I was particularly fortunate to be a Borden Fellow at the Institute of Arts and Humanities on campus. Julia T. Wood and my colleagues in the dynamic and invigorating faculty seminar gave tremendous feedback on my project at a crucial stage, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to spend that semester engaged in intellectual exchange with such a gifted group of colleagues from my own institution. While working on this book, I presented sections of my argument in a variety of public venues. I gave lectures at the University of Miami at Ohio, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, Ben

Acknowledgments

Gurion University, and Princeton University and served on numerous panels at the annual meetings of the German Studies Association and the Association for Jewish Studies. I have profited enormously from the comments, criticisms, and suggestions made by friends and strangers alike in such settings. Back in North Carolina, presentations at the Carolina-Duke German Studies Works in Progress Colloquium and the North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series gave me opportunities to engage in sustained discussion of my work with colleagues closer to home. One of the most gratifying aspects of working on this project has been the wonderful network of fellow scholars working on GermanJewish literature and culture that I have been so fortunate to be connected to. Certainly, this too was not a development I would have predicted twenty years ago, and it has been a special pleasure for me to pursue this project in such rich and rewarding dialogue with a quickly growing circle of friends and colleagues. Early on in the project, I got crucial criticism and feedback from David Brenner, Bill Donahue, Eric Downing, Katja Garloff, Jeff Grossman, Sven-Erik Rose, Till van Rahden, and Jonathan Skolnik. In many ways I developed the overall structure and argument of this book in dialogue with their comments. Discussions and exchanges with Steve Aschheim, Richard Benson, Ruth von Bernuth, Shmuel Feiner, Abigail Gillman, Sander Gilman, Martha Helfer, Susannah Heschel, Eva Lezzi, Elizabeth Loentz, Leslie Morris, Derek Penslar, Todd Presner, Laurence Roth, Karin Schutjer, Michael K. Silber, Scott Spector, Nadia Valman, Liliane Weissberg, and George Williamson all shaped the project in important ways. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Bill Donahue and Martha Helfer for inviting me to discuss a draft of my introduction at the German and Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University in February 2009. I feel much more confident about the version of the project that went to print than I would have without the chance to discuss my work in such detail with such a remarkable group of colleagues and fellow-travelers in the world of German-Jewish literature and culture. For the last three years, the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin term professorship in Jewish history and culture has provided invaluable research support. I have also incurred significant debts to the interlibrary

xi

xii

Acknowledgments

loan librarians at Davis library at UNC, and to the library staff at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, where I spent a week in late 2007. Several years ago my former graduate student Ed Potter at Mississippi State University helped me get my hands on a copy of Rahel Meyer’s hard-to-find 1853 novel Zwei Schwestern. When Ed reads Chapter 3, I trust he will see that he truly made a difference. At Stanford University Press I have had an exemplary editor in Norris Pope, and it has truly been a pleasure to work with him at all stages of this project. Maurice Samuels read the manuscript for the Press and gave me tremendous feedback and extremely helpful criticisms and suggestions for revision. I thank Maurie for the enthusiasm he brought to this project and subsequently for numerous productive and illuminating conversations about his work and my own. I would be remiss if I did not also express my gratitude to Steve Zipperstein and Aron Rodrigue for their interest in and support of this project. Sarah Crane Newman and Tim Roberts proved extremely helpful in guiding the manuscript through production, and Richard Gunde deserves thanks for his expert copyediting. Last but certainly not least, I need to thank my family. I dedicate this book to my wife Beth and our three daughters, Rebecca, Lily, and Amelia. Beth may not realize it but she provided a productive sounding board for many of the book’s ideas even as they were discussed in 30– second conversations that took place amid all the other busy activities that make up our home life. And her love, support, and presence were even more important in enabling me to write this book and do everything else I do. Rebecca, ever the avid reader, refused to read an English translation of Marcus Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar even when I made this lucrative for her. Nevertheless, the intense love of reading, books, and fiction that she shares with her two sisters gave me a constant reminder of what can be so special about literature, why people are drawn to fiction, and the powerful role that reading fiction can play in the way we fashion our identities on a day-to-day level. Portions of Chapter 2 were published previously in “Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of GermanJewish Ghetto Fiction,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 576–615. An

Acknowledgments

earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “Fictions of Modern Orthodoxy, 1857–1890: Orthodoxy and the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 52 (2007): 49–86. I thank the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Leo Baeck Institute respectively for permission to reuse this material here.

xiii

Illustrations

Figure 1 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse, 1866

3

Figure 2 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Young Girl Reading, c. 1776

5

Figure 3 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Das Laubhütten-Fest, 1867

7

Figure 4 Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Der Dorfgeher, 1873

88

Figure 5 Advertisement for Marcus Lehmann’s Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in Der Israelit, 1879

166

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Introduction  When Rabbis Became Novelists:

The Emergence of Jewish Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany

For many in the academy today, defining what Jewish literature is represents a difficult if not impossible undertaking. Does this term refer simply to literature written by Jews? Or does it include literature written about Jews? Is it limited to literature that is produced for a Jewish readership, or can it be literature that is read primarily by non-Jews? Does literature need to be written in a Jewish language such as Yiddish, Hebrew, or Ladino to qualify as Jewish literature, or can literature in English, French, or Arabic also be considered Jewish literature? If we consider that the terms “Jewish” and “literature” each mean different things to different groups of people at different times, determining what Jewish literature is may become even more a case of “defining the indefinable.”1 To be sure, many people would classify Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, and S. Y. Agnon as classic Jewish writers. What, though, about Franz Kafka? What about Marcel Proust? And perhaps most importantly, why do we need this category at all? What do we stand to gain from grouping disparate texts together under a rubric of Jewish literature that few of their authors would have used to categorize their works? By beginning with these reflections, I want to underscore a difference between the academic world we inhabit today and a pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when something new called “Jewish literature” began to appear on the scene. Jews in Europe enjoyed reading fictional texts long before the ideals of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and internal Jewish reform efforts helped unleash those dramatic transformations in the structures of traditional Jewish life that Jewish historians typically identify with modernity. From the

2

Introduction

sixteenth century on, Central and Eastern European Jewish culture favored Torah and Talmud study and privileged Hebrew literacy at the same time as it allowed for the development of a rich tradition of epics, romances, legends, fables, and chapbooks written in Yiddish, many of which survived well into the nineteenth century.2 Long before the modern era, Yiddish literature had become a fixture in the Ashkenazi world, sanctioned reading material for women that was doubtlessly enjoyed by men as well, if only as a guilty pleasure acknowledged to occupy a lower cultural plane than the sacred texts men were commanded to study. For Jews in the German lands and many parts of the Austrian Empire in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, nevertheless, something new began to happen. Following the example of eighteenth-century Jewish pioneers such as Moses Mendelssohn and nineteenth-century government initiatives seeking to promote greater integration, Jews in large numbers began to give up Yiddish and adopt German as the preferred language of daily life.3 During the nineteenth century, German Jews experienced an unprecedented level of social, geographical, and economic mobility. Surrounded by new opportunities, Jews began attending German-language schools, abandoning traditionally Jewish professions such as peddling and petty trading, and adopting the mores and behavioral norms of bourgeois culture. As Jews moved into new worlds and fashioned new identities for themselves as Germans, as Europeans, as members of the middle class, and as Jews, they encountered a rapidly expanding German-language book market, a dizzying world of lending libraries and book-traders supplying a quickly growing reading public with a seemingly constant source of newspapers, journals, novels, plays, and serialized fiction. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, the celebrated painter of nineteenthcentury German Jewry, captured this dynamic in his 1866 painting Sabbath-Ruhe (Sabbath Rest), one of the twenty images in his frequently reprinted collection, Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben (Pictures of Traditional Jewish Family Life) (Figure 1). Oppenheim here portrays an elderly woman in a Jewish quarter hunched over what seems to be the Tsene-rene, the traditional Yiddish women’s Bible. The woman sits next to her son and her young grandson, neither of whom is reading on the Sabbath, even though the young boy holds a book in his

When Rabbis Became Novelists

Figure 1. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse, 1866. Gift of the Oscar and Regina Gruss Charitable and Educational Foundation, Inc., 1999–86. Photo by John Parnell. Photo credit: The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, NY.

arm, which judging by its bookmarks is a text he is studying. Inside the home at the edge of the image, however, something else is happening. A young woman sits alone, in fashionable dress, surrounded by an almost magical light as she is absorbed reading a small, modernlooking book. Oppenheim’s portrait of the young woman is reminiscent of eighteenth-century paintings such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s A Young Girl Reading (c. 1776) (Figure 2) and clearly evokes the huge popularity that novel-reading enjoyed from the eighteenth century on, particularly among women. As Leopold Stein, a leading reform rabbi, noted in the commentary that was often published along with Oppenheim’s prints in the nineteenth century, the number on the door frame

3

4

Introduction

fatefully sets the painting in 1789, the year of the French Revolution.4 In the vision of the past created by this painting, Stein comments, the “modern age” comes to traditional Jewish life not from without but from within, through magical encounters with new forms of literature, through windows opened up by Jewish women’s traditional penchant for reading in the vernacular.5 In the year of dramatic transformation that Oppenheim tries to capture in his painting, there would have been little doubt what our young woman was reading. Stein assumes that the young lady is reading German literature. Given the prominence of best-selling novels such as Sophie von La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sternheim, 1771) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) on the international book market in the late eighteenth century, this certainly seems plausible. Yet Oppenheim’s portraits, with their visions of traditional Jewish families embodying middle-class virtues, are notorious for strategically blurring the world for which he painted and the lost world he sought to capture in his art (Figure 3).6 In this sense, for its Jewish viewers in 1866 and afterward, Sabbath-Ruhe may have summoned up a different set of associations. Oppenheim himself claimed that the literary genre of the ghetto tale that Leopold Kompert did so much to popularize starting with his breakout volume Aus dem Ghetto (From the Ghetto, 1848) was one of the sources of inspiration for his idyllic portraits of traditional Jewish life.7 By the time Oppenheim produced Sabbath-Ruhe and most of his other images of traditional Jewry in the 1860s, Kompert and other authors had produced numerous volumes of ghetto tales, and German Jews were doing much more than reading the same types of German and European literature that their non-Jewish neighbors were enjoying. In this period when Jews were rapidly ascending into the ranks of the middle classes, undertaking projects of religious modernization, and engaging with the secular world in ways their medieval ancestors could not have fathomed, Jews also launched their own form of secular culture: fiction written by Jews for Jews that, like Oppenheim’s prints, also sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new

When Rabbis Became Novelists

Figure 2. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Young Girl Reading, c. 1776. Gift of Mrs. Mellon Bruce in memory of her father, Andrew W. Mellon. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

cultural identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. It is this literature that is the subject of this book. The institution that made it possible for this literature to be so widely disseminated was the German-language Jewish press. By the 1860s, the German-Jewish press had mushroomed from its modest beginnings with David Fränkel and Joseph Wolf ’s journal Sulamith (1806–1848) into a diverse menu of options including newspapers, journals, yearbooks, and other print media, many of which appealed to readers across

5

6

Introduction

Central and Eastern Europe, and some of which drew subscribers from North America and elsewhere.8 Many periodicals, including Sulamith, had ceased publication by this time, but they had been quickly replaced by others, many of which did survive the test of time. By far the most prominent among these was the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (Universal Jewish Newspaper), a newspaper launched in 1837 by Ludwig Philippson, a liberal rabbi and moderate reformer in the city of Magdeburg. Appearing biweekly or weekly, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums continued publication until 1922, when it was absorbed by the paper of German Jewry’s most significant organization, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Despite announcing on the cover page of every issue that it was a “non-partisan organ for all Jewish interests,” Philippson’s newspaper proved not to be everyone’s cup of tea. By the mid-1860s, it had two major competitors among the increasingly vocal minority that came to characterize itself as orthodox. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the Frankfurt am Main rabbi who was the towering figure of German-Jewish orthodoxy, began editing Jeschurun, a monthly journal geared at “promoting Jewish spirit and Jewish life in the home, community and school,” in 1854. In 1860, Marcus Lehmann, a rabbi in Mainz, founded Der Israelit as a “central organ for orthodox Judaism,” creating a weekly (and sometimes biweekly) newspaper that absorbed Jeschurun in the 1880s and continued publication until it was shut down by the Nazis in 1938. There were also competitors who targeted a similar audience as the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, such as the Viennese Kalendar und Jahrbuch für Israeliten (Calendar and Yearbook for Israelites, 1842–1868), a Jewish almanac that Kompert coedited for some time, or the shortlived Der Freitagabend, eine Familienschrift (Friday Evening, A Family Journal), which Leopold Stein launched along with fellow reform rabbi Salomon Formstecher in 1859. Philippson himself, a tireless publicist, was also the force behind numerous other initiatives, including the Jüdisches Volksblatt (Jewish Popular Paper, 1853–1866), and the first major modern Jewish book club, the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Israelite Literature). Administered by Philippson, Adolf Jellinek, and Isaac Jost, the Institut played

When Rabbis Became Novelists

Figure 3. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Das Laubhütten-Fest, 1867. Gift of the Oscar and Regina Gruss Charitable and Educational Foundation, Inc., 1999–92. Photo by Richard Hori. Photo Credit: The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, NY. Oppenheim’s paintings of Jewish life often featured traditional Jewish families embodying middle-class virtues. In idylls of bourgeois family life such as Das Laubhütten-Fest, we find a prosperous family celebrating Sukkot as non-Jewish children watch with curiosity and admiration.

a pivotal role in making the Jewish book a staple of modern Jewish life, placing 200,000 copies of its fifty-five titles in libraries and private collections across Europe and the United States between 1855 and 1873.9 In the nineteenth century, the phrase “Jewish literature” was often a slippery one. At times it was still reserved for rabbinic commentary.

7

8

Introduction

At other times it was used to refer to a variety of types of writing, including works of Jewish history such as Heinrich Graetz’s multivolume Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews, 1853–1870), which the Institut helped transform into a cornerstone of Jewish library collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Among all their other projects, however, Jewish print media devoted considerable efforts to disseminating one specific type of Jewish literature, which they generally termed Jewish Belletristik. The German term Belletristik had been introduced more than a century earlier to translate the French “belles lettres.” In theory Jewish belles lettres could refer to essays, poetry, drama, fiction, and other reading material that was neither designed strictly for specialists nor meant to be consumed merely for entertainment. In the world of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish press, however, belles lettres typically came to mean prose fiction: novels, novellas, and short stories that were written with a distinctly Jewish readership in mind. More than a dozen of the Institut’s fifty-five titles ended up being works of Jewish belles lettres, and from the beginning, Philippson’s Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums played an important role promoting the development of this type of Jewish literature. From May to October of its first year of publication, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums delivered its readers installments of Philippson’s brother Phöbus’s Die Marannen (The Marranos), a historical romance about Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition that met with an eager reading public. Following this model, Jewish newspapers and journals often serialized fiction in Feuilleton or arts and culture sections much like those of other German newspapers of their day. In subsequent decades, Philippson’s paper and its competitors delivered literally hundreds of historical novels, ghetto tales, and novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life to Jews across Central Europe and beyond.10 For the nineteenth-century intellectual elites who presided over these networks of newspapers, journals, and book series that helped create a new sense of collective belonging for Jews throughout the Germanspeaking world, defining what Jewish belles lettres was proved far less interesting than ensuring that their readers had constant access to a steady stream of prose fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content. German-speaking Jews were neither the first nor the only Jews in mod-

When Rabbis Became Novelists

ern Europe to produce Jewish literature in this fashion. Later in the century, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums would celebrate Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen as “the beginning of the entirety of modern Jewish belles lettres.”11 As Maurice Samuels has argued in his pioneering study of French-Jewish writers in the nineteenth century, however, Jews in France were actually a few years ahead of their German coreligionists.12 Tellingly, the second major piece of prose fiction published by the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was a translation of a novella by French-Jewish writer Eugénie Foa, and Philippson’s paper published numerous translations of literary material from French-Jewish periodicals in its first several years.13 Elsewhere in Europe, in the Ottoman Empire, Ladino newspapers in the 1840s were already dominated by novels and novellas, many of which were creative adaptations of foreign material, particularly French and Hebrew sources.14 In England, writers such as Grace Aguilar also published innovative forms of Jewish fiction several years before the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums published Philippson’s novella.15 Whether or not German-speaking Jews were the first to produce Jewish literature in nineteenth-century Europe, the writers I study in this book wrote fiction that quickly became a fixture of Jewish life, and not just in areas where Jews came to adopt German as their native language. Studies of Jewish literature today often focus on Hebrew, Yiddish, and American writers, concentrating their energies on traditions that often do not get pushed back much before the 1880s, when authors such as S. Y. Abramovitsh, writing under the pen name Mendele Mocher Sforim, began to put Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature on the map in new ways.16 Few if any of the works I discuss in this book will be familiar to students of modern Jewish literature, and apart from Kompert’s ghetto tales and the occasional historical novel, few managed to appeal to non-Jews when they were written. Within the Jewish world in the nineteenth century and beyond, however, this body of fiction written in German and designed in large part for a Jewish audience enjoyed considerable longevity. The historical fiction I study in Chapter 1 was frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and translated into Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Ladino, and numerous other languages, enjoying a particularly long shelf life in pre-state Palestine

9

10

Introduction

and the modern state of Israel.17 In Chapter 2, when we consider the reception of Kompert’s ghetto tales, we shall discover a similarly vibrant tradition inside and outside the German-speaking world. The tradition of German-Jewish orthodox belles lettres that starts in the 1860s and that I consider in Chapter 4 rarely managed to capture the attention of anyone other than the orthodox. Within this camp, however, these texts too have endured the test of time, in German, Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, and many are still available today. The main question we need to put to this body of fiction written by Jews for Jews in the nineteenth-century German world is not what Jewish literature is. We want to ask, instead, what it did for its readers, how this literature enabled Jews to balance the multiple identities they had to contend with in a world in which questions as to who they were, what they did for a living, what they read, or who they would marry were no longer determined by the institutions of traditional Jewish life in the same way they had been in previous generations. It is in this context that our foray into German-Jewish romance fiction in Chapter 3—a genre that neither had a long shelf life nor inspired any direct imitators—becomes so crucial for understanding the more general way in which German-Jewish literature sought to use belles lettres to revitalize Jewish community and create distinctly Jewish fantasies about romantic love and bourgeois family life. A comprehensive, transnational history of Jewish literature before 1900 remains a project for the future, albeit one to which the present book seeks to make a crucial contribution. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity locates in the nineteenth-century German-speaking world a formative moment of the modern Jewish experience, exploring one of the many different national contexts in which Jewish identity became a phenomenon that was mediated by literature and culture, and not just, or not even primarily, religious tradition. From radical reformers to the modern orthodox, we shall see, German Jews increasingly invested literature that was secular in form with the task of promoting lifelong commitments to Judaism. In this way, fiction that was marketed toward men, women, and adolescents alike rapidly achieved a level of prominence and respectability that just a generation before would have been unthinkable in a culture that had

When Rabbis Became Novelists

traditionally privileged men’s study of sacred texts. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity studies the ways in which fiction came to assume an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. Just as importantly, it also explores how German-Jewish literature helped launch a tradition of modern Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today. In 1789, the year that Oppenheim chose as the setting for Sabbath-Ruhe, it might have been standard to regard belles lettres as a subordinate force in Jewish life, a legitimate activity for women’s leisure time. By the time Oppenheim sat down to produce this image in 1866, however, the creation of a vibrant tradition of popular Jewish fiction had become an obsession for Jewish men and women, and not just for lay readers. Indeed, in nineteenth-century Germany, leading rabbis like Ludwig Philippson, Salomon Formstecher, and Marcus Lehmann frequently themselves became novelists. Exactly what this means about modern Jewish culture is a question that has yet to be fully investigated.

Middlebrow Culture and the Making of Jewish Identity What sort of story about nineteenth-century Jewish life in Central Europe are we telling by focusing on this corpus of popularly oriented Jewish literature? In German Jews Beyond Judaism, a 1985 book that has exerted enormous influence on the study of German-Jewish history and culture over the past two decades, the late historian George Mosse gave what became a classic articulation of the German-Jewish love affair with high culture.18 Mosse focused on the Enlightenment-era concept of Bildung, a term that invokes education, the development of character, and the cultivation of culture and good taste, and he traced the enormous appeal that these ideals held for German Jews as they moved out of the relatively insular world of traditional Jewish society and adopted the norms and values of the middle classes.19 With its emphasis on education and the development of the individual, its secular vision of universalism, and its celebration of the great cultural renaissance of the Age of Goethe (1749–1832), the concept of Bildung offered Jews the promise of “a personal identity beyond religion and

11

12

Introduction

nationality”; indeed, as a secular and bourgeois ideal that “transcended all differences of nationality and religion through the unfolding of the individual personality,” Bildung seemed destined to secure Jews a place in the rising middle class.20 In France Jews gained equal rights in 1791, in the aftermath of the Revolution. Jews in the German lands, in contrast, saw their political status improve gradually, in fits and starts, over the course of the nineteenth century. It was not until 1871, in a newly unified Germany, and 1867 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that full equal rights were extended to Jews, and this happened after a ninety-year period which had seen successive waves of debates about the question of emancipating the Jews.21 It was during this time that Jews initially found the ideals of Bildung so attractive. In his seminal study, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840, David Sorkin demonstrated how Jews in Germany constructed a distinctive German-Jewish subculture by 1840 precisely by adopting and adapting the new ideology of Bildung.22 Jews, Sorkin argued, did not “assimilate.” Instead, for many German Jews, Bildung became the principle guiding their integration into the modern world, giving rise to new and distinctly German-Jewish forms of collective identity. For many of the German-Jewish intellectual elite in the period after 1840, Mosse argues, Bildung ultimately came to eclipse Judaism as a source of identity, becoming a secular faith that elevated the works of German intellectual giants such as Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant to near religious status. Once many non-Jews gravitated away from Enlightenment-era concepts of Bildung in the late nineteenth century to embrace more nationalistic worldviews, Mosse notes, Jews often found themselves experiencing their Jewish identity—paradoxically—through encounters with the German classics. In a Jewish milieu in which “quotations from Goethe were part of every meal,” Mosse writes, “the concept of Bildung became for many Jews synonymous with their Jewishness”; it could even become possible, as Walter Benjamin once noted, to “find one’s Jewish substance above all, in a study of Goethe.”23 In this context, it should hardly be surprising that the collected works of Goethe and Schiller came to assume such a revered place on the bookshelves of middle-class

When Rabbis Became Novelists

Jewish families in Imperial Germany, or that from the Berlin salonière Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) to the Goethe scholar Ludwig Geiger (1848–1919) and beyond, Jews played such a decisive role in the cultivation and promotion of Goethe and the German classics.24 For many German Jews, in other words, German culture was Jewish culture. By focusing on a huge body of popular fiction produced by Jews and largely for Jews, Middlebrow Literature and Making of German-Jewish Identity seeks to paint a somewhat more complex picture of the role of culture in German-Jewish life. The same period that witnessed the Age of Goethe being institutionalized as the pinnacle of modern German literature also saw the emergence of best-selling illustrated magazines, inexpensive book series, and newspapers that increasingly used serialized novels to boost sales and attract subscribers.25 The literature that appeared in the German-Jewish press made ample use of the fast-paced plots, cliffhangers, and sentimental melodrama typical of the serialized fiction of the era, and it seldom even approached the formal or thematic complexity of those works of German literature that eventually gained canonical status. As Shulamit Volkov has noted, historians have often been “oblivious to this persistent activity within the Jewish cultural sphere,” to the “popular Jewish culture” avidly consumed by Jewish men and woman who did not belong to the upper echelons of the educated segments of the bourgeoisie.26 In the forays into German-Jewish literature in the chapters that follow, accordingly, we shall encounter different models of both Jewishness and culture than those that Mosse identified among the intellectual elite. Popular Jewish culture was both much more committed to Judaism—however this was defined—and decidedly less highbrow than the literature that helped constitute the world Mosse describes. In this sense, this book joins other recent studies that have sought to explore how German Jews actively and self-consciously sought to balance multiple identities and multiple allegiances. In recent years, the vision of a distinct German-Jewish subculture that Sorkin introduced more than two decades ago has unleashed renewed and productive debate, particularly among a new generation of historians interested in the intersections between the history of civil society and German-Jewish history. Sorkin characterized the German-Jewish subculture as lacking

13

14

Introduction

in self-consciousness, as blind to the distinctive and often idiosyncratic ways in which it appropriated mainstream German culture. Recent historians, invariably building on Sorkin’s work, often reject the opposition of “minority” and “majority” cultures to stress multiple identities, multiple publics, and, particularly for the period after 1840, a constant renegotiation of forms of German-Jewish collective life.27 Within this context, Sorkin’s model of a discrete subculture fundamentally invisible to itself has undergone revision. Taking seriously a body of material that has been largely ignored by historians and literary critics alike, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity argues that popular literature played a crucial role in balancing multiple identities for Jews; that it helped sustain a sense of successful integration into the German bourgeoisie; and that it helped create a world in which Jewish identity could become a function of reading secular literature. In his seminal work on nationalism and print culture, Benedict Anderson has stressed the extent to which the nation is an “imagined community,” a sense of collective belonging mediated by a leap of faith in which individuals come to identify with others whom they neither have met nor will ever meet face to face.28 Anderson’s notion of the nation as a community imagined through the medium of print lends itself particularly well to a study of the role of German-Jewish belles lettres in creating a novel sense of Jewish community in the nineteenth century. German-Jewish fiction may not reveal much about the social coordinates of a German-Jewish subculture or provide concrete socio-historical data about what Till van Rahden has aptly termed the “situational ethnicity” of German Jews.29 But studying this material does help foreground what many social historians have not, namely, the important role that German-Jewish belles lettres played in imagining GermanJewish social relations, the vital function that fiction could assume in promoting a community of Jews and other Germans at the same time as it promoted a distinctly middle-class identity for Jews as Jews. In the chapters that follow, we will not discover any major geographical centers of German-Jewish literary life, any literary salons where authors came together, or any schools that issued programmatic statements. Like their readers, the men and women who produced the fic-

When Rabbis Became Novelists

tion this book explores came from all over the German-speaking world, from Danzig to Offenbach, from Vienna to Frankfurt am Main, and from small towns in Bohemia and Moravia and hamlets off the beaten track such as Klötze in the Altmark. Rarely did these writers ever meet face to face. What brought them together was the same print network that sought to reach Jewish readers throughout those parts of Europe where German was spoken as a primary language or where it functioned as an important lingua franca. In the case of German-Jewish literature, print helped readers imagine not a nation but a community that both surpassed the bounds of nationhood and was designed to exist alongside it. German-Jewish fiction helped Jews experience and imagine their Jewish identity in new ways, that is, at the same time as it encouraged them to see themselves as belonging to a new world of German culture that transcended the boundaries of existing political states. Even after the creation of the German Empire in 1871, German culture was rarely seen as the property of a single nation-state. More than just a “German” affair, German culture extended its reach to vast areas of the AustroHungarian Empire where German functioned as an official language of administration, a significant cultural or ethnic marker, and/or a vehicle of social mobility. Part of what enabled this literature to promote multiple identities so well was that it departed from the formal and aesthetic norms of high culture. In many cases, we shall see, German-Jewish belles lettres owed explicit debts to all sorts of genres of literature that literary elites saw as typical for the increasingly market-driven entertainment that had posed a threat to the new visions of art and culture central to visions of Bildung from the beginning. From the late eighteenth century on, German intellectuals had been defending high culture against the perceived threat of market-driven reading material, defining the noble tasks of art that was an end in itself in opposition to the superficiality and escapism of art that catered to the vulgar tastes of the public.30 As luminaries such as Karl Philipp Moritz, Kant, and Schiller characterized it, great art ennobled and built character, serving as the source of a disinterested form of pleasure that enabled readers to rise above historical contingencies to experience their true humanity. The type of popular entertainment so often aligned with contemporary fiction and the novel, on the other

15

16

Introduction

hand, was rarely perceived to serve the high goals of Bildung. Critics often characterized fiction as an addictive, hallucinatory, and socially corrosive form of pleasure, one that alienated readers from the real world, unleashed romantic fantasies, and encouraged an unending cycle of identification with imaginary heroes and heroines. The typical German term for popular literature, Trivialliteratur, coined in the early twentieth century but still used today, perpetuates the condescending attitude that late eighteenth-century luminaries translated into a philosophical defense of high art.31 As Daniel Purdy has commented, critics of German literature have generally tended to regard this so-called Trivialliteratur as something to be “catalogued and counted but not interpreted.”32 Indeed, only recently have scholars of German literature begun to move beyond a rigid dichotomy between high culture and low or mass culture to take eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular literature seriously as an object of study.33 By studying the crucial function of popular literature in German-Jewish culture, Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity both builds on this scholarship and goes off in new directions. In nineteenth-century Central Europe, familiarity with the newly minted classics of the Age of Goethe functioned as an important source of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu terms “cultural capital,” a privileged marker of distinction, character, and good taste that could testify to one’s newly found—or yet to be achieved—middle-class status.34 In this context, it should not be surprising that German-Jewish memoir literature frequently comments about the revered place of German and European high culture in German-Jewish family life.35 And we should not be astonished that whatever its debts to popular literary forms, German-Jewish popular literature never came to define itself in opposition to the values of Bildung and high culture. In his pioneering work on the Jewish historical novel, Jonathan Skolnik has argued that Jewish writers of historical fiction sought to carve out a “minority niche within the contemporary field of cultural production” that would give Jews a “means of acquiring the ‘cultural capital’ that was a prerequisite for integration in the age of Bildung.”36 In using belles lettres to promote both Jewish community and an identification with the larger world of German culture, writers of German-Jewish literature willfully aligned themselves with the values of Bildung.

When Rabbis Became Novelists

As we shall see repeatedly over the course of this study, German-Jewish fiction sought a strategic middle ground between the often marketdriven world of popular entertainment and the allures and the difficulty of the realm of high culture. To be sure, much of the literature I discuss in the following pages might easily be categorized as sentimental melodrama. In its direct appeals to the emotional world of the reader, its suspenseful, intrigue-driven plots, its often simplistic moral universe, and its penchant for formulaic family dramas, German-Jewish fiction differed little from the huge volume of popularly oriented literature produced by non-Jews in the nineteenth century. In many ways, German-Jewish fiction is far more similar to the wildly popular yet critically disdained works of August von Kotzebue (1761–1819)—a figure seen as a crucial lynchpin in the emergence of the melodramatic mode in the nineteenth century—than those of Goethe or Schiller.37 Like Kotzebue’s popular drama and so much nineteenth-century sentimental fiction that followed in its wake, German-Jewish literature typically steered clear of tragedy. Rather than gravitating toward literary forms that sought to lay bare fundamental paradoxes and conflicts, German-Jewish literature generally preferred happy endings that catered to the perceived taste of the reading public and that tended to celebrate the triumphs of German-Jewish life in the present. As film critics and others have noted, melodrama outlived the nineteenth century to find renewed life in twentieth-century popular culture, and as a result, the types of narratives we will encounter in the following chapters may seem familiar, and at times particularly formulaic. But describing German-Jewish fiction as sentimental melodrama only tells half the story. This literature betrayed its debts to popular literary genres at the same time as it liberally borrowed from, and inevitably allied itself with, the classics of both the Age of Goethe and contemporary European literature. Getting at the root of this dynamic will prove key to understanding the various tasks this literature sought to perform for its readers. In 1892, the writer Ludwig Jacobowski released a novel called Werther der Jude (Werther the Jew), a Jewish recasting of Goethe’s Werther that went on to become a classic of German-Jewish literary life.38 In rewriting Goethe the way he did, Jacobowski was building on a tradition of adapting classics of German literature to make them serve the interests of a German-Jewish public that went back a good fifty-five years. In the

17

18

Introduction

following pages, accordingly, we will discover Jewish fictions that creatively rewrote any number of texts from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, and Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris—to name just a few. To a large extent, German-Jewish fiction was highly derivative, borrowing plots, themes, characters, and subject matter from both disparaged genres of popular culture and European literature’s emergent classics. Readers expecting to encounter a German-Jewish rival to Goethe’s Faust, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or any of the other classics of nineteenth-century European literature in the pages of this book will inevitably be disappointed. We shall discover over and over again, however, that the process of adapting and rewriting classic and contemporary works of fiction and drama to produce distinctly Jewish forms of belles lettres had its own form of complexity. It is important in this context that German-Jewish fiction hardly cast itself as derivative. It routinely presented itself, instead, as exemplary of the very best in German culture, as literature endowed with the mission of rendering the Jewish experience the stuff of great art. What is more, nineteenthcentury critics often characterized it in precisely these terms. In this sense, this body of literature offers both a fascinating example of what has come to be known as middlebrow fiction and a crucial window into the mechanisms by which German-Jewish community and Jewish belonging to a larger German public could be negotiated simultaneously. Since the term middlebrow was coined in the 1920s, critics have regularly decried the insidious and often indiscriminate way in which middlebrow literature vulgarizes and corrupts great art, creating popular knock-offs of classic literature that pose a threat to the elite world of high culture. The term middlebrow arose first in an Anglo-American context, at a point when from the perspective of literary elites and academic critics, the publishing industry seemed to be taking on a life of its own that seriously undercut their authority as arbiters of literary taste. In recent years, however, critics of American literature such as Janice Radway and Joan Shelley Rubin have done much to rehabilitate the middlebrow and study its unique logic. In their scholarship and that of others who have followed in its wake, the middlebrow is no longer a synonym for hackneyed and pretentious mediocrity. It is, rather, a com-

When Rabbis Became Novelists

plex cultural phenomenon, one that combines democratic ambitions of accessibility and a critique of cultural elitism with a dramatic transformation of books into commodities and support of forms of consumer culture that are often at odds with both middlebrow’s democratic ideals and its claims of aesthetic grandeur.39 Particularly when we bring the nineteenth-century German book market into our discussions, the predicament of the middlebrow will seem especially applicable to the project of German-Jewish belles lettres. German-Jewish literature certainly did not use the term middlebrow to describe itself, and this category requires some modification to be used with regard to nineteenth-century German culture. In a middleclass milieu marked by the all-pervasive category of Bildung, there was little fear that German-Jewish literature was going to take Goethe and Schiller off their pedestals. Indeed, German literature after the Age of Goethe routinely declared its own deficits in the face of the literary giants of the previous generation, and luminaries such as the celebrated dramatist Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863) were known to complain about the “elegantly produced mediocrity” plaguing German literary life.40 For many in both the German and German-Jewish literary world in the years after Goethe’s death in 1832, literary greatness seemed particularly elusive. As we study German-Jewish belles lettres alongside the frequent discussions of both German and German-Jewish literature in the nineteenth-century press, it will become clear that this middlebrow fiction was clearly meant to supplement rather than supplant the high cultural giants it introduced its readers to indirectly. German-Jewish belles lettres was designed to be consumed alongside other, less markedly Jewish literature produced by non-Jews and Jews alike. In this context, it had a cultural mission—a commitment to creating Jewish community through print—that set it apart from the dynamics of consumer culture that may have fueled readers’ desires for Bildung and respectability in other forms of middlebrow fiction. German Jews in the nineteenth century produced and consumed their own form of popular culture at the same time as they participated in general German literary life, and here as well they did so both as writers and as readers. The cultural landscape of the nineteenth-century German world was shaped by numerous highly prominent Jewish personalities such as Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, and Ludwig

19

20

Introduction

Börne, figures whose works often end up on the syllabi of university classrooms today. Varnhagen, Heine, and Börne found more than their share of admirers among Jews in the nineteenth century. They did so alongside other figures who were prominent in their time but who are lesser known today such as the novelist Fanny Lewald or the writer Berthold Auerbach, who after experimenting with writing Jewish novels made his fame with his “village tales” of life in the Black Forest. With the exception of Auerbach, nevertheless, all these writers had one thing in common: they were all Protestants, converts to Christianity, and as such they were of limited use to a German-Jewish public eager to balance allegiances to German culture and Jewish tradition.41 Against this backdrop, middlebrow fiction took on the task of creating literature for Jewish readers that would do precisely what the works of Varnhagen, Heine, Börne, Lewald, and even Auerbach did not. German-Jewish fiction actively and explicitly encouraged Jews to fashion new identities for themselves that would reconcile commitments to German and European bourgeois culture with Jewish tradition. As we shall discover time and time again in the chapters that follow, it was the middlebrow nature of this literature that was the key to its success. German-Jewish belles lettres excelled when it came to combining disparaged traditions of sensationalist melodrama with claims to represent the epitome of high culture. Our primary goal in studying this material is not to discredit this literature’s claims to aesthetic grandeur. We need, rather, to understand the dynamic role it played in giving Judaism and Jewish life an aesthetic form that commanded respect. We need to appreciate how it was that the institutions of German-Jewish life in the nineteenth century and beyond came to celebrate these texts as the auspicious beginnings of a vibrant tradition of Jewish belles lettres that was in no way inferior to its non-Jewish competitors. For Jews in nineteenth-century Central Europe, modernity obviously meant integration into a once foreign world of German culture and abandoning many aspects of traditional Jewish life. At the same time, it also entailed the creation of multiple new identities linking the present and the past, and it is here that middlebrow fiction came to assume such a vital role. One of the most prominent means by which Jews sought to enter into the ranks of the middle classes was by revitalizing and repackaging their religious rituals and traditions, by creating

When Rabbis Became Novelists

what historians such as Marion Kaplan, Paula Hyman, and Benjamin Baader have described as distinctly bourgeois forms of Judaism focused on home, family life, and the role of women inside and outside the domestic sphere.42 In nineteenth-century Jewish life, traditionally male realms such as Talmud study lost ground, giving way to public expressions of Judaism—prayer and study in the vernacular, the elevation of women’s natural propensity for piety as a general model, or the phenomenon of the rabbi as novelist, for that matter—that in earlier generations would have been seen as female and as inappropriate for Jewish men. Building on the work of German social historians of religion, Baader aptly terms this process a “feminization” of Jewish culture. The emergence of Jewish middlebrow fiction designed to be read by men, women, and adolescents alike was part and parcel of these processes of religious modernization that Jews shared with their Protestant and Catholic contemporaries in nineteenth-century Germany. And Jews were hardly alone or unique in creating their own forms of literature. Somewhat later in the nineteenth century, the sizeable Catholic minority in Germany too began to produce its own popular culture.43 The secular culture of the Age of Goethe had deep roots in German Protestant traditions, and for both Jews and Catholics this posed a challenge. In this context, we should hardly be surprised that the project of launching a tradition of Jewish belles lettres was common to nearly every branch of German Jewry, from reformers to the modern orthodox, from those who conceived of Judaism in quasi-Protestant terms as a religious denomination to those for whom Jewish identity was a question of ethnic allegiances or kinship relationships. In theoretical statements, these groups inevitably defined Judaism and its legacy in radically different ways: as a universalist code of ethics reminiscent of Kant’s categorical imperative, as a binding system of law revealed at Mount Sinai, as a culture with a presciently bourgeois sense of the importance of marriage, family, and education, or as a residual obligation of respect for the sufferings of one’s ancestors. Yet for all these groups in practice, middlebrow literature that was secular in form increasingly took on the task of reinventing Jewish tradition, of remaking the Judaism of the past to render it compatible with the norms of a rising bourgeoisie that placed an unprecedented symbolic value on the civilizing potential of great literature. It is in this sense that German-Jewish

21

22

Introduction

middlebrow fiction initiates a mode of experiencing Judaism that has long outlived its original historical and geographical context, a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways alive and well today.

Reconstructing German-Jewish Literary Culture, 1837–1890 Each of the four chapters that follow focuses on a different genre of German-Jewish fiction, mapping out the development and entrenchment of German-Jewish belles lettres from the late 1830s until roughly 1890, the period that saw the emergence of a broad-based Jewish middle class in Central Europe. The year 1890 provides a convenient end point for our discussions for two reasons. First, the 1890s ushered in a period of significant change in Jewish life. German-Jewish life at the fin-de-siècle was radically transformed by the need for organized responses to political antisemitism, by the rise of political and cultural Zionism, and by the emergence of widespread cultural and political critiques of bourgeois culture. In German-Jewish literature, accordingly, the decades straddling 1900 witnessed the publication of any number of major novels that departed decisively from the celebration of German-Jewish bourgeois values that we will encounter in nineteenth-century middlebrow fiction. Works such as Jacobowski’s Werther der Jude, Jakob Wassermann’s Die Juden von Zirndorf (The Jews of Zirndorf, 1897), Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (Old New Land, 1902), Karl Emil Franzos’s Der Pojaz (The Clown, 1905), Georg Hermann’s Jettchen Gebert (1906), Auguste Hauschner’s Die Familie Lowositz (The Lowositz Family, 1908), and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open, 1908) are in many ways radically different from each other, but they all seek either to move beyond or to issue critiques of or alternatives to the German-Jewish bourgeois culture whose praises we will hear sung time and time again in the texts to be studied in the following chapters.44 Zionism too, even though it was a minority position within German Jewry, had fundamental consequences for German-Jewish literature and culture after Herzl and others galvanized the movement in the late 1890s.45 At the same time—and this is the second reason why it proves con-

When Rabbis Became Novelists

venient to stop before the end of the nineteenth century—the tradition of middlebrow belles lettres launched by the Jewish press hardly disappears after 1890, even in the face of Zionism and even amid fundamental critiques of the bourgeois family values so central to this fiction’s vision of Jewish continuity. Jewish newspapers such as the Israelitisches Familienblatt, the most popular Jewish periodical of the 1920s, continued to publish serialized fiction that departed little in form or function from the texts under study in this book, and the same goes for numerous other Jewish journals, book series, and newspapers during this period.46 Lehmann’s Der Israelit, for instance, published ghetto tales and historical fiction well into the early 1930s, and many of the texts we will be studying found themselves reprinted in popular-oriented book series in the first part of the twentieth century as well. In many ways, the tradition that develops from 1837 to 1890 continues on unabatedly until 1933. Writing a book about hundreds of largely forgotten works of fiction that will most likely never regain their popularity has given me a professional excuse to indulge my own penchant for reading sentimental melodrama. My discussions in what follows, accordingly, try as best as possible to capture the experiences that these nineteenth-century narratives may have given their readers. Unlike some studies of canonical works by major writers, this book does not pretend to offer daring new interpretations of a set of exemplary individual texts. What is at stake for me, instead, is reconstructing the more general literary culture in which this type of fiction acquired such a high level of respectability. Rather than limiting myself to texts, I thus place considerable emphasis on historical analysis of the various tasks that authors, readers, and commentators expected this literature to perform. To this end, I balance my discussions of literary texts whenever possible with both intensive reception studies and a consideration of the business of Jewish book and newspaper publishing in the nineteenth century. To be sure, not all the material studied in this book lends itself to such an approach in equal measure. Kompert’s ghetto fiction, as we shall see in Chapter 2, left a particularly rich paper trail in both the German-Jewish press and the general German and European press, and this sets it apart from much of the other literature I study. Most readers of German-Jewish belles lettres in the nineteenth century—like most

23

24

Introduction

readers of fiction at other times—did not record and preserve their responses with a view toward providing archival evidence for the cultural historians of the future. Nevertheless, whenever I can integrate reviews, discussions in the press, advertisements, print history, recollections from memoirs, and other aspects of literary reception into my discussions, I do so. Inevitably, there will be purists who may object to the way this book moves so fluidly between my own analysis of texts and discussion of the ways in which actual nineteenth-century readers encountered these texts and encouraged others to do so. My concern in this book, however, is less with interpreting literature per se than with coming to terms with the more general culture in which Jewish middlebrow fiction gained such prominence. To this end, the discussions in the four chapters that follow are organized not by author but by genre, with each chapter exploring a major type of German-Jewish fiction and the particular ways it encouraged readers to balance multiple identities and bring Judaism firmly into the present as a force shaping modern life. As we shall learn in Chapter 4, Marcus Lehmann, the orthodox rabbi in Mainz, gave his continually expanding and often reprinted multivolume anthology of fiction the title Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (From Past and Present). Not so coincidentally perhaps, this book follows similar organizational principles. Chapters 1 and 2 both deal with genres of literature invested with the task of shaping cultural memory of the past, with historical fiction and the ghetto tale. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with fictions about the contemporary world, with Jewish recastings of popular traditions of romance fiction and the sentimental novel of family life. A major advantage of organizing our discussions according to genre is that it enables us to reconstruct the broad spectrum of German-Jewish belles lettres, with each chapter illuminating a different model of the middlebrow. For instance, Kompert’s ghetto tales, which we turn to in Chapter 2, seek to marry liberal models of bourgeois popular literature such as those promoted by Berthold Auerbach to an effort to transform the immediate Jewish past into a great German tragedy. In its efforts to wed tragedy—a genre often seen to epitomize high culture—to popular literary forms, ghetto fiction operates in a different register from much of the other literature under study in this book. The German-Jewish romance fiction we explore in Chapter 3 could not present a more striking

When Rabbis Became Novelists

antithesis to Kompert’s tales. In its often unequivocal celebration of the bourgeois cult of domesticity and distinct predilection for happy endings, this body of fiction borrows much more intensely from lower cultural forms such as the romance novel and seems much closer in spirit to the fiction published in popular contemporary bourgeois magazines such as Ernst Keil’s Gartenlaube. At the same time, we also discover within this body of literature works like the novels of Rahel Meyer. Meyer sought to critique the conventions of German-Jewish romance fiction and move beyond the middlebrow to create a great German-Jewish female Bildungsroman (novel of education), a genre often aligned with high culture. And even the German-Jewish romance novels that lack such aspirations find other ways of distancing themselves from the popular-cultural models they draw on. Other texts provide yet further models of navigating between high and low cultural registers and other paradigms of relating to both the classics of the Age of Goethe and a variety of contemporary cultural forms—high, low, and middle. Rather than spending further time sketching out the project in general terms, it may make sense now to move into our first major genre, considering the tradition of German-Jewish historical fiction that Ludwig Philippson helped unleash by publishing his brother’s Die Marannen in the inaugural volume of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837. Historical fiction, we shall see, not only exemplifies the new power, authority, and prestige given to middlebrow belles lettres in nineteenth-century Jewish culture. Our study of this material will also give us a glimpse into the process by which nineteenth-century Jewish culture invented its own tradition of literary classics.

25

O n e  Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition:

The Sephardic Legacy and the Making of Middlebrow Classics

Tales from the Lending Library: Popular Literature and the Origin of Jewish Belles Lettres In July 1907, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums published an article commemorating the centennial of the birth of Phöbus Philippson (1807–1870), a country doctor in a small town in the Altmark who was also the older brother of the paper’s founding editor, Rabbi Ludwig Philippson (1811–1889).1 During his lifetime, Phöbus Philippson was a published authority on cholera and the editor of medical journals. What interested the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1907, however, were less the provincial doctor’s medical accomplishments than his pioneering contributions to literary life, his inauguration of a tradition of Jewish historical fiction:

26

Phöbus, who was very gifted as a writer of novellas, recognized that depictions of the rich history of Israel in novella form could be an effective means of deepening religious feeling and could be particularly gripping for young people. . . . The first work of Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen [The Marranos], a tale about Spanish history at the time of the eviction of the Jews in 1492, appeared in the newly founded Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837. Today, when the book market produces title after title in rapid succession, it is hard to imagine how Philippson’s supremely inspired tale set young people on fire and inspired the older generation. Indeed, Ludwig could not get his brother to send him installments quickly enough, and he received numerous letters from members of the public impatiently demanding the next installments. When Saron, Ludwig Philippson’s extensive

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

collection of Jewish novellas, appeared in 1843, it opened with Die Marannen, which met with universal approval and was translated into many languages, including Hebrew.2

The genius of the Philippson brothers’ collaboration, we read here, was that it yielded powerful and gripping historical fiction, Jewish pageturners that strengthened the religious feelings of their readers while instilling in them a constant and growing desire for more such literature. In his obituary for Phöbus in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1870, Ludwig Philippson similarly praised the “extraordinary success” of Die Marannen, proudly describing his brother’s novella as “an entirely new and momentous phenomenon” that marked nothing less than “the beginning of the entirety of modern Jewish belles lettres.”3 Die Marannen, of course, is hardly the only text that literary historians have enshrined as the inaugural piece of modern Jewish fiction. Even scholars of German-Jewish literature routinely point out that the same year that witnessed the serialization of Philippson’s novella in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums also saw the publication of Berthold Auerbach’s novel Spinoza, and Heinrich Heine’s novel fragment “Der Rabbi von Bacherach” (The Rabbi of Bacherach), which was published in 1840, was written much earlier, in the 1820s.4 But unlike Auerbach and Heine, who went on to write literature largely on non-Jewish themes that was read and admired by the general public, the Philippson brothers continued cultivating fiction by Jews about Jews for a primarily Jewish readership. In this sense, Philippson’s novella does demarcate an important starting point.5 Die Marannen itself appeared in print eight times between 1837 and 1870; it was published in book form in Yiddish and Russian in the late nineteenth century; and it appeared in two different English translations and three different Hebrew translations, one of which even rendered it into verse.6 The following decades witnessed the production of scores of further Jewish historical novels and novellas. In keeping with Philippson’s insistence that his brother’s 1837 novella represented a pivotal point of departure, moreover, the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 proved a seemingly unending source of fascination for German-Jewish readers. From the German adaptation of Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of

27

28

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

Cedars (1850) that Ludwig Philippson distributed through the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Israelite Literature) in 1860 to Philippson’s own novel Jakob Tirado (1867) and Marcus Lehmann’s modern orthodox classic Die Familie Y Aguillar (The Family Y Aguillar, 1873), novels and novellas about the Iberian Jewish experience became a fixture in German-Jewish literary life. This phenomenon persisted well into the twentieth century through works such as Hermann Sinsheimer’s Maria Nunnez (1934) and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo, 1955).7 As Ismar Schorsch argued in a seminal article two decades ago, the German-Jewish fascination with Spain formed part of a “Sephardic mystique” that was ubiquitous in liturgy, synagogue architecture, scholarship, and belles lettres in the nineteenth century.8 Fascinated by the immense cultural and scholarly productivity in the centuries before 1492, and particularly in the period when Spain was largely under Islamic rule, Jews in the nineteenth-century German-speaking world often fashioned Golden Age Spain as a “usable past,” styling the experience of Sephardic Jewry as a model of “cultural openness, philosophic thinking, and an appreciation for the aesthetic” worthy of being imitated in the present.9 Whether focusing on the poets Jehuda Halevi or Abraham Ibn-Esra, the philosopher Moses Maimonides, the traveler Benjamin of Tudela, or the biblical critic and statesman Isaac Abarbanel, German Jews often found in the glories of the Iberian Jewish past a presciently modern model of cultural integration, an attractive alternative to both the experience of suffering and persecution in medieval Germany and contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe.10 And as Florian Krobb has argued, the fact that the Spanish experiment came to end so tragically only reinforced its pull on the German-Jewish imagination. For Jews seeking to maintain multiple identities as Germans, Jews, and members of the bourgeoisie, the experience of those Iberian Jews who underwent baptism but continued to practice Judaism in secret provided a particularly productive foil for reflecting on assimilation and its limits.11 For the Anglo-Jewish novelist Grace Aguilar, who came herself from a Sephardic family, the dual life of the conversos in Spain could serve indirectly as a model for Jews eager to transform Judaism into a do-

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

mestic religion that would be tolerated but hidden from view. 12 German-Jewish writers had for the most part no genealogical link to the Sephardic past. Unlike Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars, their works typically emphasized the disgrace and despair of Marrano life, characterizing it as the antithesis of a modern world in which Jews could effectively balance multiple allegiances. Many recent historians and literary critics have stressed the precociously modern and even postmodern hybridity of the Marrano experience, the ways crypto-Jews created radically new identities for themselves that were neither Jewish nor Catholic but often cast both religious traditions into question.13 Writers like Lehmann and Philippson who were eager to create a vibrant German-Jewish literary culture, however, had little sympathy with such ambivalence. Lehmann, for instance, opened an 1868 novella about crypto-Jews in Madrid by stressing the hypocrisy of converso life: “Marranos! The misery that this word encompasses is indescribable. Marranos were those Spanish Jews who had been too weak in the fifteenth century to sacrifice fatherland, fortune and the sweet habits of homeland to their faith.”14 Ludwig Philippson has the virtuous female heroine in Jakob Tirado, the legendary seventeenth-century historical figure Marie Nunes, express similar sentiments. Marie Nunes, who eventually escapes from Portugal and helps found the modern Jewish community in Amsterdam, complains frequently about the hypocrisy of her converso ancestors whose legacy is an “ill-fated inner conflict that has been torturing us for so many years and that embitters every hour of peace.”15 It was in this sense that the experience of Iberian Jewry could be made to speak directly to the German-Jewish present, celebrating the nineteenth century as that era where such ill-fated conflicts awaited their final resolution. Philippson’s Marannen, for instance, which despite its title deals primarily with Jews who fled Spain in 1492 rather than with actual conversos, concludes in the early sixteenth century by rewriting the history of Ferdinand and Isabella’s financier Isaac Abarbanel. The historical Abarbanel escaped from Spain in 1492 to end up in Venice, where he continued to serve as a protector of his fellow Jews and complete an influential corpus of biblical criticism, becoming one of the leading Jewish scholars of his day. As Philippson noted in an essay he published in 1834 on the history of the expulsions from Iberia, when Abarbanel died, in 1508, he was mourned by Jews and the Vene-

29

30

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

tian elite alike, survived by three sons and many grandchildren.16 In Die Marannen three years later, Philippson gave the life story of Abarbanel a different sort of closure, staging a reunion between him, his only son, and an entirely fictional adoptive, German-born daughter, Dinah, on the island of Corfu. Abarbanel ends here, without the prospect of having further descendants. The final link in an illustrious family that traces its genealogy back to King David, he is doomed to a life of dual exile: “The exiled Marrano gazed toward the East and toward the West, driven out both there and here, in one direction looking toward the ruins of his Temple on the soil of Palestine, in the other toward the ruins of his domestic happiness in the valleys of Iberia.”17 For readers of this novella in the nineteenth-century German world, this melancholy conclusion was not without hope. The dual exile of Philippson’s refugees obviously pointed toward a new homeland in the Diaspora that would surpass the idealized lost paradise of the Iberian peninsula. It was the task of German Jews to take the place of Abarbanel’s adoptive daughter and carry on the legacy of Sephardic Jewry. For the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1907, nevertheless, Philippson’s Marannen was important less because of the distinctly secular tale of exile and redemption it invoked than because of its ability to set readers on fire and fuel their rage for reading Jewish literature. To be sure, the jubilee article cited above did not limit itself to stressing the novella’s popularity. Invoking Philippson’s “great love for German literature,” it expressed wonder that despite living in a “monotonous region that was not even connected by a major road to the rest of humanity,” our country doctor managed to create and sustain a rich inner life through the world of print culture. He “read the best writers of the past and contemporary literature” and also produced literature that became “a beloved friend” and an “enduring Bildungsmittel”—a source for the formation of character—in so many Jewish homes.18 Ludwig Philippson similarly praised his brother’s “noble aesthetic taste,” the “perfect, noble language” of his works, and the connections he nurtured with the “literary and cultural developments and intellectual life of the era.”19 There was more at stake, however, than the power of print culture to ennoble the soul. The Philippson brothers’ genius in 1837 was not just a case of creating great literature that might function as a vehicle of cultural memory and a conduit for new forms of Jewish historical conscious-

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

ness. Serializing fiction in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837 worked so well because it both fulfilled and ignited the demands of the readership of this new paper for literary texts that would allow them to indulge in the pleasures of reading. Die Marannen represents an important launching point for the development of German-Jewish literature thus not simply because of its content but because of its form, because of its indebtedness to the immense body of popular fiction that began flooding the German book market in the early nineteenth century. It was during this time, we remember, that Jews began attending German-language schools in large numbers, adopting German as a language for everyday use, and acclimating themselves to the mores and behavioral norms of bourgeois culture. At this time, an edition of the works of the influential Romantic writer Novalis (1772–1801) cost as much as sixty pounds of beef, and books were generally far too expensive for most middle-class families to afford.20 The rapidly growing reading public of the early nineteenth century typically turned to the novel institution of the commercial lending library for its reading material. Lending libraries began to develop in the late eighteenth century but experienced their heyday between 1815 and 1848, supported by a growing publishing industry that began to invest huge amounts of capital in the production and dissemination of literature made expressly for such institutions. During this period, when literary elites were in the midst of enshrining authors like Goethe and Schiller as high cultural icons that marked the epitome of modern German literature, it was fiction more than anything else that libraries used to lure in customers and keep afloat financially. The newly minted classics by Goethe and Schiller certainly made their way into the collections of commercial lending libraries. They did so, however, alongside hundreds of now forgotten writers who produced the Gothic novels, robber novels, ghost stories, historical novels, love stories, sentimental tales of family life, and other forms of popular literature that contemporary elites condemned for their superficiality and escapism and that scholars of German literature eventually came to group together (and typically dismiss) under the rubric of Trivialliteratur or “trivial literature.”21 The Philippson brothers had first-hand experience with this aspect of the book trade. During his years as a medical student in Halle, Phöbus himself ran a lending library, using the income to support his mother

31

32

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

while apparently enabling his ten-year-old brother Ludwig to read through the library’s vast collection of plays and recent novels in its entirety.22 As a teenager, Ludwig worked part time in a local widow’s lending library, organizing its inventory while reading through hundreds of volumes. Later in life, he recalled that it was through this experience that he turned away from literature of poor taste to discover the works of Sir Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper, and others.23 When Die Marannen appeared in 1837, Ludwig Philippson was in his late twenties, and the institution of the commercial lending library was experiencing unprecedented popularity. It was only in the 1840s, with the emergence of newspapers carrying serialized novels and the launching of inexpensive book series such as Reclam, that the lending library’s function of providing affordable reading material for the middle classes began to be eclipsed.24 Against this backdrop, this up-and-coming rabbi’s decision to start serializing fiction in the second number of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was an extremely savvy and forwardlooking one from a commercial point of view. Novellas had appeared in serialized form in German periodicals since the eighteenth century, but starting in the 1830s arts and culture or Feuilleton sections began to become regular features in German newspapers. By making belles lettres an integral part of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums from the beginning, Philippson was producing a Jewish newspaper that looked like, and provided a similar reading experience to, the most up-to-date German periodicals of his day, a paper destined to be more successful than his short-lived monthly journal targeting rabbis and Jewish educators, the Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin (1834–1837). Before writing fiction, Phöbus Philippson had published pioneering research on the expulsion of Jews from Iberia in the Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin,25 and the interest in Sephardic Jewry that he and others helped unleash was obviously motivated by a whole host of complex factors in German-Jewish culture. In terms of the book market of the day, however, few topics would have seemed as readymade to attract potential readers as the violence, gore, and injustices of the Spanish Inquisition. Philippson’s novella may or may not represent the “beginning of the entirety of modern Jewish belles lettres.” Its scenes of auto-da-fes, torture, and violence, its account of corrupt and power-hungry Catholic officials and sham court proceedings—all

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

of this, however, would have been familiar to readers of the popular fiction of the period. August Leibrock (1782–1853), a teacher and owner of a lending library in Braunschweig, for instance, was a prolific and popular writer who produced fifty-one novels, at least six of which were set in Spain.26 His 1824 novel Der Cardinal. Eine spanische InquisitionsGeschichte (The Cardinal: A History from the Spanish Inquisition) is, like Die Marannen and so much subsequent German-Jewish historical fiction, a suspense-driven narrative full of intrigue, show trials, and scenes of torture, with some illicit romance thrown in between its evil title figure, the Grand Inquisitor of Madrid, and his adoptive daughter and mistress, whom he eventually locks up in his secret prisons.27 Like so many other Northern European writers, Leibrock presented Spain as an accursed land that exemplified religious fanaticism, injustice, and sheer violence, a land driven to persecute and/or conquer all those who do not subscribe to what his narrator repeatedly terms the “bigotry” of Roman Catholicism. Leibrock’s novel was hardly unusual in portraying Spain in this manner. Matthew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk (1796), a sensation on the international book market, depicted the irrationalism and fanaticism of Spanish Catholicism in a similar light. “In a city where superstition reigns with such despotic sway as in Madrid,” we read in the novel’s famous opening, “to seek for true devotion would be a fruitless attempt.”28 Drawing on the so-called Black Legend, Northern Europeans had portrayed the blood, gore, violence, and religious fanaticism of Spain in sensationalist terms for generations, gradually coming to supplement this vision of Spain with a Romantic fascination with Spanish chivalry by the early nineteenth century.29 In the wake of the huge popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction in Germany—following the first translation of his works in 1817, Scott was routinely one of the three most successful authors in commercial lending libraries30— historical novels about Spain only grew in popularity. At the conclusion of Scott’s enormously popular Ivanhoe (1819), which appeared in German just one year after its English debut, the virtuous Jewess Rebecca of York famously resists conversion to Christianity and departs England to live under the Muslim ruler Boabdil in Spain. With its account of a Jewess who refuses conversion and its gesture toward the relative tolerance of Muslim Spain, Scott’s Ivanhoe provided an especially attrac-

33

34

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

tive model for German-Jewish writers. Philippson’s Marannen owed a particular debt to Scott in many aspects of its plot, not least of all in its portrayal of the steadfast commitment to Judaism that propels Abarbanel’s adoptive daughter Dinah to deny her love for the Christian Spaniard Alonzo.31 Boabdil also played a role in many fictional and semi-fictional treatments of the fall of Granada in 1492, appearing in both Die Marannen as well as in internationally successful texts such as Washington Irving’s A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila, or the Siege of Granada (1838). BulwerLytton, the British novelist known for international best-sellers such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and for coining hackneyed phrases like “It was a dark and stormy night,” was, like Irving, among the more popular authors in German lending libraries.32 For many nineteenth-century writers before and after Philippson’s Marannen, the world of the Spanish Inquisition and the ousting of the Moors in 1492 was thus a familiar setting for historical fiction, part of a well-tested recipe for successful melodrama. Yet contemporary works about the Inquisition typically required serious fine-tuning to be adapted to the needs of Jewish writers. Irving’s Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, for instance, explicitly addressed itself to Christian readers, applauding “the elevation of the cross in that city, wherein the impious doctrines of Mahomet had so long been cherished.”33 Irving paid little attention to either Jews or the abuses of the Inquisition. Like Rebecca in Ivanhoe, the title figure of Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila was a Jewess. Yet unlike Scott’s Rebecca or Philippson’s Dinah, Bulwer-Lytton’s Leila happily converts to Christianity under the benevolent influence of a friend of Queen Isabella. At the dramatic denouement of the novel—and as Michael Ragussis has pointed out, this was very much in keeping with Christian ideologies of conversion—her vengeful, fanatic Jewish father murders her just as she is about to become a nun.34 Fantasies about conversion aside, there was also a long tradition in Northern Europe in both literature and historical writing of focusing on the Inquisition’s Protestant victims.35 Leibrock’s Der Cardinal, for instance, mentions the “Jews, Mohammedans, witches and devil-worshippers” who fell prey to the Inquisition at one point, and at just one point, in his 382–page thriller.36 The main cast of characters the novel follows are all early sixteenth-century “enlightened” Spanish Christians

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

whose sole crime is owning and reading books by Martin Luther. Except for reports of a secret Jew who provided the enlightened vicar Antonio with his Lutheran reading material, Jews, along with Muslims, witches, and Satanists, are entirely absent from the novel. In this way— and the book lacks all subtlety in this regard—Leibrock creates for his Protestant readership a gory tale of intrigue and deception in sixteenthcentury Spain that celebrates Germany as the land of the Reformation, Enlightenment, and religious tolerance. In many ways, then, Die Marannen and subsequent German-Jewish fiction simply rewrote such popular narratives of the Inquisition, putting Jewish rather than Protestant victims at center stage. The tales of Jewish heroism and Jewish martyrdom that emerged from this process of appropriation often made no secret of their indebtedness to a long Protestant tradition of anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish invective. In the more general ruminations on history that he intersperses throughout Die Marannen, for instance, Philippson describes 1492 as the “great year that bids farewell to the entire Middle Ages,” explicitly looking forward to the modern era that will be ushered in, in part, by the “Reformation of the bold Augustinian monk in Wittenberg.”37 Ludwig Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, tellingly, ends triumphantly in the Netherlands not just with former conversos establishing a flourishing Jewish community but with a narrator explicitly celebrating the Northern European Protestant paradise that makes this possible. Late sixteenth-century Amsterdam, we are told, offered a “safe haven for all oppressed peoples,” a “sanctuary for confessors of all religions” that “breaks the power of the Inquisition” and allows the great “tree of liberty of conscience” to “take firm root” so that it might eventually spread all over the globe.38 More than evidence of a Sephardic mystique, German-Jewish novels about Spain sought to insert Jews into dominant master-narratives in Protestant popular culture that cast the Spanish Inquisition as the epitome of fanaticism and cultural and political backwardness. Novellas like Die Marannen represent a pivotal point of departure for the development of Jewish belles lettres, in other words, because of their fundamental lack of originality, because they could build so successfully on a rich tradition of melodrama that used Spain as the backdrop to celebrate the virtues of the Protestant world’s modernity, civilization, and tolerance. What makes these Jewish fictions of the Inquisition so remarkable

35

36

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

is that, unlike Leibrock’s Der Cardinal and so much other early nineteenth-century popular literature, they did survive the test of time. For the readers of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums decades later, Die Marannen was not pulp fiction but a work of profound literary taste that could be trusted to deepen religious feeling and inspire young and old alike. Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, a novel his son-in-law Meyer Kayserling celebrated as a “masterpiece equal to the best products of modern German literature,” was translated into Dutch and Russian, and appeared in numerous Hebrew and Yiddish editions; included in the offerings of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, it too reached a wide readership in the German-speaking world and was republished in 1891.39 Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars, which was also part of the offerings of the Institut, appeared twice during the nineteenth century in German; it was released twice again in the early twentieth century as part of the Jüdische Universal-Bibliothek, a prominent inexpensive book series published in Prague that modeled itself after Reclams UniversalBibliothek, historically one of the most successful German book series of all time.40 Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar, originally serialized in the orthodox newspaper Der Israelit in 1873, was republished in 1892 as a free gift to subscribers of this popular periodical and included in two prominent orthodox book series in the early twentieth century—in addition to appearing in German, Hebrew, English, Spanish, and Yiddish well into the late twentieth century.41 And many novellas, such as Ludwig Philippson’s “Die drei Brüder” (The Three Brothers), originally published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt in 1854, were subsequently reissued, like Die Marannen, in Phöbus and Ludwig Philippson’s popular anthology Saron, destined in this way to become fixtures of German-Jewish literary life.42 Writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Philippson complained about authors who reveled in producing “bloody scenes” and “horror stories from the history of medieval persecution” that made no claims to educate or ennoble their readers.43 As we shall see over the course of this chapter, accordingly, one of the characteristic features of German-Jewish fiction about the Inquisition was the extreme care it took in reworking popular traditions, the way it sought to obscure its debts to types of literature that cultural elites routinely discredited as bereft of aesthetic value. In many ways, it shared this

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

challenge with historical fiction more generally. As late as 1847, the distinguished literary historian Robert Prutz (1816–1872) began an essay stressing the potential of historical fiction by conceding that many contemporaries saw historical fiction—a genre that was the clear “favorite” of a “voraciously” reading public—as an industrially produced form of literature hardly deserving to be considered art: “The majority of our aestheticians has had little difficulty declaring the historical novel to be a straight-out aberration, a product more of industry than of art, a mere product of the desire to write and read that has grown so immoderately in this paper century of ours.”44 For many contemporaries, the historical novels produced en masse for German lending libraries in the early nineteenth century clearly occupied a realm distinct from that of high culture. Later in the century, as historical fiction gained somewhat in credibility, it faced different challenges. New copyright laws passed in 1867 allowed the works of Goethe and Schiller to pass into the public domain, making way for numerous inexpensive editions of the classics.45 With the innovative publishing house Reclam leading the way by disseminating 20,000 inexpensive copies of the first part of Goethe’s Faust as volume 1 of its new Reclams Universal-Bibliothek just months after this new legislation went into effect, claims that German-Jewish historical fiction was marked by “noble, aesthetic taste” and equal to the best recent pieces of German literature faced an additional uphill battle. In order to function as a credible vehicle for cultural memory for a Jewish community moving into the middle classes, then, GermanJewish historical fiction about the Sephardic legacy of exile and dislocation had to reflect on its own status as literature, and it did so explicitly. Against the backdrop of a bifurcated literary landscape, we shall see, German-Jewish historical fiction sought to steer a middle ground, to produce literature deeply dependent on popular narrative forms that could nevertheless stake a claim to be a viable form of high culture with all the bourgeois respectability that entailed. It may indeed have been Phöbus Philippson’s genius to recognize the extent to which historical fiction could be an effective means of bolstering the Jewish identity of the growing group of Jews who were becoming voracious readers of contemporary literature. The issue we need to explore in grappling with this body of literature is how the models of Jewish identity it gave rise to navigated their way between these two divergent traditions, be-

37

38

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

tween the enduring fascination in contemporary popular culture with the gore, terror, and torture of the Inquisition, on the one hand, and the ephemeral world of high culture on the other. In this sense, this chapter’s analysis of the Sephardic experience and the making of middlebrow classics lays bare both the lofty ambitions of German-Jewish historical fiction and its attempts to produce hybrid cultural forms. Despite its persistent and self-conscious alignment with the world of high culture, this literature at times prominently betrayed its debts to popular culture. In what follows, I thus focus on this literature’s self-conscious quest for distinction at the same time I call attention to the inevitable discrepancies that emerge between this literature’s sense of its own calling and its indebtedness to traditions of sensationalist melodrama. As we shall come to discover, the mixing of high and low cultural registers in German-Jewish middlebrow fiction fluctuated considerably when it came to its level of self-consciousness. There is little in this body of nineteenth-century literature that does anything to anticipate the innovative and radical ways in which the early twentiethcentury avant-garde sought to bridge what Andreas Huyssen terms the “great divide” between high art and mass culture.46 Rather than foregrounding the discrepancies between this literature’s insistence on its aesthetic value and its dependence on stock traditions of melodrama as signs of weaknesses or aesthetic flaws, nevertheless, the analysis that follows seeks to understand how this literature functioned, as middlebrow fiction, to bolster the Jewish identity of its readers. In this sense, we shall see, the productive interaction between high and low cultural registers in German-Jewish fiction about the Spanish Inquisition will prove key to understanding both the ongoing appeal of this literature in particular and the more general way in which belles lettres came to assume such a prominent place in nineteenth-century German-Jewish culture.

“Only Art Can Ennoble Us”: Inquisition Fiction and the Creation of Modern Jewish Culture In their original preface to Saron in 1843, the Philippson brothers made no reference to the dynamics of the book market. Instead, invoking the

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

language of Schiller’s aesthetics and Hegel’s philosophy, they presented Saron as the crucial and final step in the creation of a self-consciously modern Jewish culture: Research can enlighten; scholarship can present evidence; but only art can ennoble us. The process of education [Bildung] is complete only when feelings and attitudes go through the prism of art, when the material takes on the artistic form that allows it to come into view. . . . Over the course of the last century Judaism has entered into the narrow circle of European life. Society, education [Bildung], scholarship have all seized hold of it. And now, finally, ennobling art has approached the great material that the content and history of Judaism offers, both to do its part in giving renewed life to tradition and to polish off the old rust from the external form that is eating away at it and distorting it. We maintain that with these final acts the emancipation of Judaism . . . is complete.47

For the Philippsons, the Jewish literature they are releasing in Saron functions as an agent of both tradition and modernization, preserving the essence and history of Judaism as the same time as it grants its Jewish material a type of aesthetic form apparently unprecedented in the entirety of Jewish history. In an age where bourgeois ideas of Bildung reign supreme, only art can promote true nobility of character. Against this backdrop, the publication of Saron represents a pivotal moment in the creation of a new form of Jewish culture: a type of Judaism that is emancipated because it can boast the aesthetic form necessary in a world that privileges art’s unique ability to function as a vehicle of edification and character formation. Reissued in subsequent editions of Saron, comments like these foisted expectations on German-Jewish fiction that clearly set it apart from the mass-produced historical novels that had become the preferred reading matter of many patrons of commercial lending libraries. Leibrock’s Der Cardinal, whatever its agenda in juxtaposing Spanish fanaticism to the moderation, enlightenment, and tolerance it presented as the legacy of the Protestant Reformation, made no claims to be anything but a fastpaced melodrama using the Inquisition as a backdrop. At the end of the novel, once the evil Grand Inquisitor meets a well-deserved death through the help of a friendly group of bandits, the Lutheran heroes enjoy a fair trial, are released from the hold of the Inquisition, and then

39

40

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

live happily every after—in Spain. The machinations of the Inquisition are certainly important to the novel’s plot. Indeed, so much of the thrill of reading a book like Der Cardinal lies in the way its omnipotent narrator gives his readers access to the secret courts, prisons, and torture chambers of the Inquisition. At the end of the novel, however, we are told that “the happy ones had nothing left to wish for, and indeed, history itself does not report that any further unpleasantries happened in the course of their lives.”48 Whatever Leibrock’s ideological attachments to Lutheranism, he ultimately proves more committed to providing his readers a suspenseful piece of entertaining fiction with a quick-fix happy ending than to searching for an aesthetic form that would allow his subject matter to ennoble his readers—or his novel to be regarded as a work of culture deserving to be read alongside Goethe or Schiller. Some German-Jewish fiction about the Inquisition, to be sure, differed little from Leibrock in this respect. Adolf von Zemlinsky’s novella “Die Rache des Juden. Historische Erzählung aus dem Mittelalter” (The Jew’s Revenge: A Historical Tale from the Middle Ages), serialized in Der Israelit in 1874, for instance, indulges in similar spectacles of terror and torture.49 Zemlinsky, who converted from Catholicism to Judaism in 1870 to marry his Sephardic wife in Vienna, portrays Catholicism and the Inquisition in the harshest possible light. The central figure in his narrative is the villain Alfonso de la Puerta, a representative of the Grand Inquisitor described as a rabid Jew-hater, sadist, and sexual predator. The revenge invoked in the novella’s title is that of Benjamin Juda Levi, who in 1493, at the tender age of eight, witnessed his father, mother, and younger siblings being burnt to death at an auto-da-fe in Madrid. Vowing retribution against de la Puerta, who lusted after his mother Mirjam and delivered the Levi family to the Inquisition when she spurned him, Benjamin returns to Spain a decade later and kidnaps de la Puerta’s illegitimate son. He escapes with him to Frankfurt am Main and brings him up as a Jew named Aron, only to return to Spain ten years later. Predictably, Benjamin and Aron fall prey to the Inquisition and end up in de la Puerta’s torture chambers, where Benjamin delights in revealing Aron’s identity to his father as he is enjoying tormenting him with iron screws. Once Aron, covered in blood, speaks out and professes his love for Judaism directly to the father whom he renounces, Benjamin gives up his quest for vengeance.

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

De la Puerta, shocked by this experience, feels remorse, and once he finds himself unable to torture Jews as his job requires, he languishes away in prison. Aron and Benjamin, on the other hand, we are told, return to Frankfurt, and each gets married and lives happily every after, “happy as human beings can be with faithful, loving wives at their side and surrounded by thriving children.”50 Like Leibrock’s Der Cardinal, Zemlinsky’s “Die Rache des Juden” abruptly tacks on a happy ending to a tale that delights in recounting scenes of torture, terror, and obsessive revenge, and the novella never even begins to explore the complex issues it raises. First and foremost here is the vision of Jews as bent on seeking vengeance, which the novella seems to lend credence to even as it concedes at points that according to Jewish tradition revenge belongs to God and God alone.51 Within the context of literature about the Inquisition, this novella is certainly interesting because of its celebratory portrayal of a Catholic convert to Judaism, and this may be related to its author’s own recent conversion. In other works, Zemlinsky often includes accounts of Christians who embrace Judaism.52 Ultimately, however, “Die Rache des Juden” differs little from the sensationalist accounts of torture and terror that are the motor behind Leibrock’s fiction. Zemlinsky clearly invites his readers to take pride in an account of Jewish resistance to the Inquisition, albeit a devious one eerily reminiscent of antisemitic stereotypes. He does little, however, to lend his tale the type of aesthetic form—or consistency— that would set it apart from other run-of-the mill portrayals of the Black Legend that plundered the Inquisition for its sheer entertainment value. Seen within the context of German-Jewish fiction in general, however, Zemlinsky’s novella is the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, Jewish fiction about the Inquisition carefully balanced the excesses of sensationalism with a keen sense of literature’s higher calling. Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar, for instance, also has a fast-paced plot, with lots of intrigue, deception, torture, poisonings, bandits, and mass executions at dramatic auto-da-fes. Like in “Die Rache des Juden,” we also encounter a lecherous church official, the Dominican monk Fray Balthasar, who lusts after a Marrano woman, Annunciata Y Aguillar, and becomes obsessed with revenge once his designs are thwarted. Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars similarly abounds in vivid accounts of torture and the secrecy of the Inquisition, not to mention the requisite

41

42

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

lecherous inquisitor. Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, while considerably less racy than these other tales, gives a dramatic account of the constant fears of the Inquisition that plague its Marrano protagonists. Even in Amsterdam, we are told, the former conversos still feel the “sword of the Inquisition over their heads.”53 All these texts, however, do more than mine the Inquisition for its sensationalist potential and use it as a backdrop for stock melodrama. As we shall see in what follows, they all undertake the challenge of creating literature out of this material that might claim to be something much more than lurid, sensationalist fiction, literature that might participate in the process of Jewish renewal by rendering the Jewish past the material of great art.

The Last of the Marranos, or the Allures of Jewish Romanticism: Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars and Its German Reincarnations In 1858, a certain “Dr. M.” reviewing Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars for the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums recommended this historical romance heartily to his readers. Thanks to the magnificent German translation by J. Piza, he notes, “the uninformed reader will hardly be able to guess that he is dealing with an adaptation from a foreign language.”54 Piza, in fact, not only renamed the novel Marie Henriquez Morales, after its protagonist, the virtuous young Jewess who dies peacefully in her family’s secret mountain refuge—the “vale of cedars”—after surviving both the violence of the Inquisition and the kind-hearted attempts of her friend, Queen Isabella, to convert her to Christianity. Piza’s “free adaptation” also amended Aguilar’s text, cutting back on an apparently typically British love of detail and deleting one final scene, set in England, that celebrated the efforts of Sir Arthur Stanley, a liberal, enlightened Englishman who was once in love with Marie, on behalf of the Jews.55 As Dr. M. noted, Marie Henriquez Morales could not just effectively pass for a German-Jewish novel, but it also possessed “precisely that which forms the characteristic element of a work of art.” Indeed, he claimed, “few recent novels or novellas are as satisfying as the present narrative of Grace Aguilar.”56 What made Marie Henriquez Morales such a superior piece of litera-

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

ture, he notes, quoting liberally from Piza’s preface, was its ability to mediate between the particular and the universal, its skill in transforming Jewish history into a great Romantic novel: The task here was to give sensual and individual expression to the universal and eternal idea that the supreme and most holy truth lies in the human being’s unshakable fidelity to itself, and the poetess . . . achieves this in a rare and almost perfect fashion. We Jews distinguish ourselves from all other peoples—from both the nations of antiquity and the nations that currently occupy the stage of world history—through the tenacity with which we hold on to our historic past and allow it to shape us. The memory of the short period when we were able to develop freely and undisturbed . . . in Spain has exerted a powerful influence on us. Indeed, there is today no other existing people that is influenced as strongly as we are by such a distant historical period from the Middle Ages. For us, this period forms the only point of connection that we have had with the Romantic movement and is thus the inexhaustible source from which specifically Jewish novelists draw on with special predilection. Grace Aguilar, influenced by her own family memories, has understood how to make excellent use of this Spanish-Jewish epoch of history. . . . The Middle Ages were already coming to a close . . . , and for the last time the departing sun of chivalry was illuminating the Spanish court with its rosy light.57

In an age dominated by Romantic novels about the medieval era, Jewish writers like Aguilar have something unique to offer, a form of literature that apparently nurtures a much more intense relationship with the past and manifests a much more deeply felt historical consciousness than the national literatures of the major world powers of the day. Aguilar’s novel about a young Spanish Jewess who remains true to her faith is more than just exemplary Jewish literature. For both its translator and reviewer, Marie Henriquez Morales ultimately gives voice to a universal and eternal truth, one expressed through the medium of a Jewish historical novel. The pull that the Spanish-Jewish experience exerts on modern-day Jews is important, in other words, not simply because of Jewish collective memory but because of its enormous potential for the creation of Romantic fiction of uncontested value.58 The value of The Vale of Cedars, then, is that it effectively captures the spirit of the last great days of Spanish chivalry, telling a tale of Jewish

43

44

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

martyrdom that is at once the tale of the downfall of Spain. The text itself, as we noted above, has more than its share of graphic depictions of torture, melodrama, and lecherous inquisitors. Aguilar subordinates all this, however, to a larger narrative structure that links the story of the fictional Marie Morales to the genesis of the Spanish Inquisition, creating in this way a Jewish historical novel in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott.59 In this novel that begins in 1479, Marie is part of a family that has been practicing Judaism in secret for generations. Indeed, in the fictional world of The Vale of Cedars, crypto-Jewish life in Spain dates back to the early seventh century, to the forced baptisms of 613. The Inquisition was also introduced to Spain long before the fifteenth century, existing for centuries as a secret force, a “network of secret and terrible tribunal[s]” whose “power and extent were unknown to the Sovereigns of the land.”60 In Aguilar’s novel, it is only when this secret Inquisition comes to light—after Marie with the help of her uncle escapes from its torture chambers—that Isabella’s confessor, Tomas Torquemada, convinces Ferdinand and Isabella to consolidate their power by creating an official Inquisition that would function as an arm of the newly unified Spanish monarchy. Unlike Lehmann or Philippson, as we noted earlier, Aguilar emphasizes the virtues of Marrano life, and indeed, she explicitly seeks to refute charges of hypocrisy as overly marked by presentism. “It is well,” her narrator comments, to pronounce such judgment now, that the liberal position which we [Jews] occupy in most lands, would render it the height of dissimulation, and hypocrisy, to conceal our faith; but to judge correctly of the secret adherence to Judaism and public profession of Catholicism which characterized our ancestors in Spain, we must transport ourselves not only to the country but to the time, and recall the awfully degraded, crushing, and stagnating position which acknowledged Judaism occupied over the whole known world.61

In this sense, the task of Aguilar’s historical novel is to capture the authenticity of Marrano life as it was lived, from the inside, without judging it against standards that she claims were plainly not available in fifteenth-century Spain. As a novelist, Aguilar takes significant liberties with the historical record to this end, rendering the entirety of SpanishJewish history a backdrop for her passionate defense of the secret Juda-

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

ism that her fictional heroine grew up with in the vale of cedars. In the extensive accounts of Spanish-Jewish history she inserts into the novel, for instance, she claims that crypto-Judaism flourished unabated during the entire period from 613 until 1492. Obviously, she concedes, there were some few in Spain, before the final edict of expulsion in 1492, who were Hebrews in external profession as well as internal observance, but their condition was so degraded, so scorned, so exposed to constant suffering, that it was not in human nature voluntary to sink down to them, when, by the mere continuance of external Catholicism—which from its universality, its long existence, and being in fact a rigidly enforced statute of the state, could not be regarded either as hypocrisy or sin—they could take their station amongst the very highest and noblest in the land, and rise to eminence and power in any profession, civil, military, or religious, which they might prefer.62

In this idiosyncratic account of Spanish-Jewish history, the only golden age is the golden age of crypto-Judaism. Rather than focusing on Maimonides, Jehuda Halevi, Benjamin of Tudela, Isaac Abarbanel, or the numerous other Jewish poets, philosophers, statesmen, and luminaries that occupied the imagination of nineteenth-century GermanJewish writers, Aguilar paints a picture of pre-1492 Spanish-Jewish history where Jews thrive as Marranos in a world in which there were few other choices.63 And no one exemplifies this better in The Vale of Cedars than the Morales family. Despite its outward Catholicism, Marie’s family passionately nurtures Judaism in private, in its secret vale, practicing Jewish rituals, celebrating holidays, and nurturing “solemn secrets” that had been passed down for generations “from father to son, from mother to daughter.”64 Marie herself knows the Hebrew Bible inside out, in the original, and like the rest of her family, she is fiercely committed to endogamy. The novel opens, in fact, with a sentimental scene reminiscent of Scott’s Rebecca in which Marie renounces her love for the Englishman Sir Arthur Stanley. Plagued by her consciousness of “having sinned in loving a stranger thus,” she recognizes the authority of “my father’s God,” willingly submits to the “strong ties of kindred, so powerful in their secret race,” and happily enters into marriage with her cousin Ferdinand Morales.65 Within the framework of the novel as a whole, this idyllic vision of

45

46

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

Marrano life is important because its demise is imminent, because the creation of a united Spanish monarchy with the Inquisition as its official strong arm is about to mark the end of eight centuries of flourishing crypto-Jewish life. In the world portrayed at the outset of the novel, secret Jews thrive at court and fully partake of the great chivalry that characterizes Aguilar’s Spain. Indeed, Marie’s husband, Ferdinand, is a favorite at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Marie herself develops a close personal friendship with Queen Isabella, whose deep religiosity mirrors her own.66 For the most part, The Vale of Cedars presents fifteenth-century Spain in overwhelmingly positive terms, as the last great moment of the Middle Ages. “Never had chivalry shone with so pure and glorious a luster in the court of Spain,” we are told, “as then, when, invisibly and unconsciously, it verged on its decline.”67 In Spain, the “sense of honor was so exquisitely refined,” and before the Inquisition comes to power, the evidentiary procedures of Spain’s courts were strikingly similar to those of “modern courts of justice.”68 In the fictional world of The Vale of Cedars, the fate of Aguilar’s Marrano heroine is inextricable from Spain’s fall from grace. Once the novel’s villain, Don Luis Garcia, the grand inquisitor of the secret inquisition, murders Marie’s husband and frames Sir Arthur, Marie finds it necessary to confess her secret Judaism so that her potentially damaging testimony against Sir Arthur cannot be used in court. Marie’s revelation sends “a shock, which vibrated not only through Isabella’s immediate court, but through every part of Spain.”69 What happens in the aftermath of her confession changes both her world and that of Spain for ever. Don Luis, acting on his own, arranges for Marie to be kidnapped and delivered to his secret prisons, where she is subject to extreme torture and his own sexual advances. Rescued by her uncle, she survives, a victim of rape and torture with a shriveled up, lame left arm. It is, subsequently, her experience—and her experience alone—that enables Torquemada to convince Isabella and Ferdinand to take action against the secret inquisition and establish an official Inquisition in its place. At the same time, Isabella takes it on herself to save Marie by engineering her conversion. Once she fails, she allows Marie to return to the vale of cedars where she dies, her fate serving as representative for “hundred, aye thousands, of Israel’s devoted race [who have] thus endured; [who] in every age, in every clime, have been exposed to martyrdom.”70 In

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

this way, The Vale of Cedars clearly recounts an exemplary tale of Jewish martyrdom. But Aguilar’s historical novel also creates a world in which the emergence of the Spanish Inquisition and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews from Spain only make sense if one understands the story of her fictional Marrano heroine. In this sense, Marie’s death captures the end of an era, signaling the end of the glory of both Spain and its Jews. In Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, as we mentioned earlier, former Marranos escape to Amsterdam where they live openly as Jews. In Die Marannen, Jewish refugees end up on Corfu, and Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar grafts its fictional account of the Y Aguillar family onto the biography of Diego d’Aguilar, a former Marrano who became a court Jew in Vienna in the early eighteenth century (and who some GermanJewish contemporaries claimed—erroneously—to be an ancestor of the Anglo-Jewish novelist).71 Rather than following the formula of these coming-out stories, Aguilar has her heroine die in a hidden Jewish refuge on Spanish soil just as the Inquisition is coming to power, and this is obviously in keeping with her narrator’s emphasis on viewing the Marrano experience on its own terms, without comparing it unfavorably to the more liberal political conditions that at least some Jews enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Marie does not find redemption by living life openly as a Jew outside of Spain. Rather, she dies a martyr’s death in Spain, hoping for a liberal utopia in “heaven [where] there is no distinction of creed or faith,” and anticipating that in the world to come, “where Jew and Gentile worship the same God,” she will reunite with her friend Queen Isabella as well.72 The fact that Aguilar’s German translator deleted the final scene where Sir Arthur returns to England and tells of his attempts to convince Ferdinand and Isabella to repeal the edict of expulsion only made it easier for Jewish readers in Germany to identify their own present—and not necessarily Aguilar’s England—as the potential heaven on earth alluded to in the novel’s conclusion. Following Dr. M.’s lead in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, German-Jewish readers could thus proudly adopt Aguilar’s past as their own, finding in this tale of the last of the Marranos an exemplary historical novel in the manner of Sir Walter Scott that—whatever its indebtedness to sensationalist accounts of the terror and torture of the Inquisition—offered precisely the type of edifying reading experience they might expect from the best recent literature.

47

48

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

Four years before Dr. M.’s celebration of The Vale of Cedars as a historical romance of the highest order, Ludwig Philippson delivered a different sort of tribute to Aguilar. In 1853, three years after Aguilar’s novel appeared in English, Philippson launched the Jüdisches Volksblatt, a weekly supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums that was eventually incorporated into the paper as its separate arts and culture or Feuilleton section. In the very first volume of the Jüdisches Volksblatt, a paper which reached a circulation of over 1,000 in its first year alone,73 Philippson published a novella of his entitled “Die drei Brüder” (The Three Brothers) that offered a sequel of sorts to The Vale of Cedars. Indeed, the beginning of the novella, which describes a solitary figure wandering through the mountains to a family refuge hidden in a gorge in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Granada, bears more than a passing resemblance to the long description at the beginning of The Vale of Cedars of Sir Arthur’s path to the Morales family’s hidden home. As much as Philippson builds on Aguilar, “Die drei Brüder” is important because of the ways in which it rewrites the work of the popular Anglo-Jewish novelist. Its entire action taking place in a replica of Aguilar’s mountain retreat, “Die drei Brüder” both gives a fundamentally different account of Marrano life from The Vale of Cedars and also distances itself even further from the sensationalism of popular fiction about the Inquisition that still makes its way into Aguilar’s novel. Philippson occupies Aguilar’s mountain refuge, that is, only to turn it against itself, using it to explore not the terror and trauma of the Inquisition but to reflect self-consciously on the diversity and vibrancy of Jewish life in the Diaspora after 1492. In doing so, we shall see, this text also reflects on its own status as literature, inviting its readers to approach it as an exemplar of the literary principles the Philippsons set forth in their preface to Saron. Philippson’s narrative, set in August 1504, tells the story of three sons who, following a pledge they made to each other ten years earlier, return to Spain from various corners of the world to commemorate the anniversary of their father’s death. Their father died in 1494, on Tisha B’Av, the solemn Jewish fast day dedicated to mourning the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem and also used to commemorate other major tragedies, including the expulsion from Spain. Don Luigi, their beloved father, was eighty years old when the Jews were

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

evicted in 1492 and, as the narrator communicates to us without passing judgment, “he could not resolve to leave Spain.”74 For two years, the father thus lived with his unmarried sons on the run from the Inquisition, in this hidden gorge in the mountains, before he finally died in their arms, and the narrative is set up in such a way as to equate the death of the father symbolically with the tragic loss of Spain as a beloved fatherland: And why were these three brothers so banished from the world [that they hid away in this mountain gorge for two years]? Not voluntarily. After centuries of happiness and peace, after long periods of magnificent scholarship and science, of upstanding contributions to the arts, trades and agriculture, and of numerous services performed for king and fatherland, Ferdinand and Isabella, the bigoted founders of the Spanish Inquisition, issued an order of exile for all Jews in Spain, without respect to position, fortune, age and way of life. Only those who prayed to the cross in the Roman Catholic manner should be allowed to breathe on Spanish soil. It made no difference whether these Jews were rightful property owners or not, or that many of their ancestors had settled in this country before Christianity appeared on earth. All, all, all of them were commanded to leave behind their beloved home, the cradle of their children, the graves of their fathers.75

Spain is cast here as a lost paradise, a land of peace and prosperity which allowed Jews and others to thrive. For the three sons returning to mourn father and fatherland alike, however, Spain is little more than a symbolic graveyard, a land of idolatry that they return to this one last time to pay their respects—and then a place which they turn their back on at the end of the tale, full of sadness, each returning “to his new homeland,” never to see each other or Spain again.76 Unlike Aguilar, Philippson never idealizes the secret Judaism that prospered in his vale of cedars. Anything but a Romantic refuge where Judaism thrives, Philippson’s mountain gorge is a temporary exile where Don Luigi’s three sons wait for their dreams of fatherland to die before venturing out beyond the Iberian peninsula to find new homelands. “Die drei Brüder,” to be sure, is hardly devoid of sentimentalism, and these three faithful sons all have deep respect for the accomplishments of the past and the centuries of open and prosperous Jewish life in Spain that came to an end in 1492. But in this novella the past is most

49

50

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

decisively past. The brothers traveling secretly through Spain to their mountain gorge do not just suffer from constant fear of the “thugs of the Inquisition”; they despair at seeing once prosperous Jewish schools turned into monasteries, synagogues that are being used as storefronts, and Jewish cemeteries transformed into parklands and vineyards; and they are painfully aware of the absence of Moors and Jews across a desolate Spanish landscape.77 Rather than indulging in nostalgia for the lost glory of the Sephardic past, Philippson’s narrative quickly moves on, allowing each of the brothers to share his story of successful integration into Jewish communities outside Spain. In this sense, “Die drei Brüder” is less a narrative about the terror or trauma of the Inquisition than a tale about dealing effectively with loss—the loss of both father and fatherland—and finding new homelands. The year 1492, in other words, may indeed represent a watershed in Jewish history akin to the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. But for these three sons of Spain, the twelve years since the institution of the Inquisition have ultimately been marked not by trauma, displacement, and mourning but by triumphs that allowed them each to realize “great goals they never would have suspected.”78 In this sense, the text celebrates the resilience of Jewish life in the Diaspora, offering up less the Jewish experience in Spain than the experience of exile from Spain as a model for the German-Jewish present. Rather than offering a narrative of torture, kidnappings, lecherous inquisitors, and secret court proceedings, Philippson makes Aguilar’s vale of cedars the site where former Spanish Jews engage in distanced reflection, ultimately telling tales of surpassing the glory and grandeur of their Sephardic ancestors. These three sons celebrate Tisha B’Av and commemorate their father’s death by reflecting on how far they have each come since they turned their back on the vale of cedars ten years earlier. The oldest brother, Abraham, a rabbi, relates how he first made his way to France. At first, Abraham despaired at the low level of culture and scholarship among his Ashkenazic brethren, who proved a hostile audience for both the rationalist version of Judaism he drew from Maimonides and his distinctly Sephardic sense of the perfect compatibility of Judaism with secular culture. Eventually, however, Abraham is discovered by an enlightened Jew from the Netherlands, and by the end of 1496 he finds himself the associate rabbi in Amsterdam, expecting one

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

day to become the successor to the “honorable old chief rabbi, who is now the pride and joy of Spanish Jewry.”79 The fact that Amsterdam had no organized Jewish community until a century later—as contemporary sources such as Kayserling’s Sephardim (1859), Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews, 1853–1870), or Philippson’s own Jakob Tirado (1867) all noted80—plays no role in this historical fiction. What matters is that after some initial trials and tribulations, the spirit of Spanish Jewry proves easy to transplant to Northern Europe, where it functions as an agent of enlightenment and modernization. Unconstrained by the demands of writing history proper, Philippson’s novella takes liberties with the historical record that transform the Morales family refuge into a place where three brothers bond by reflecting on extraordinary tales of triumphs over adversity. In this framework, distanced reflection on the past and anticipation of future glory completely displace the sensationalism of Inquisition fiction. The next son in line, Jose, ends up being no one less than the famous Joseph Nasi, the Turkish-Jewish statesman and financier who was a banker in Antwerp, the Duke of Naxos, the Lord of Tiberias, and a celebrated intercessor on behalf of Ottoman Jewry. Here again, the fact that, as contemporary sources noted, Nasi was born to a Marrano family in Portugal at the beginning of the sixteenth century is less important than the function of this figure in Philippson’s novella, the way he too “can look with back with satisfaction on the brilliant role that fell to [him],” a “rarity in our time for a son of Judah.”81 Marie Morales may die a melancholy martyr’s death. The occupants of Philippson’s vale of cedars, however, become leading rabbis and spokesmen for modernity in Northern Europe and leaders of a flourishing Sephardic Diaspora in the Ottoman Empire. Sanzo, the youngest brother, was the most obsessed with chivalry and knightly virtues (and the least knowledgeable about Judaism) during his adolescence in Spain. His story thus serves as a telling index of the way Philippson reworks Aguilar’s mournful celebration of the last great days of Spanish chivalry. Sanzo too finds his way to worldrenown fame and glory, becoming the leader of a powerful nation of Jewish Bedouins in the Sahara who enjoy complete political independence and claim to be the descendents of the Beni Qurayza, a group of Jews whose entire male population was massacred by Mohammed in

51

52

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

627. With French inroads into North Africa in the early nineteenth century, tales about such Jewish Bedouins started to be widely circulated in Europe, and Philippson was hardly alone in fueling fascination with such groups of Saharan Jews.82 Modern historians, to be sure, would dismiss this group’s claims to be direct descendents of the survivors of the 627 massacre as the stuff of legend. In the fictional world of “Die drei Brüder,” however, no one finds any reason to question the lineage of the Beni Qurayza. The rabbi in Amsterdam and the Duke of Naxos are delighted to learn that their baby brother is in fact “Adun-Midbar, the famous ‘lord of the desert’ whose reputation reaches all the way to Istanbul.”83 By concluding with Sanzo’s incredible account of the last decade, Philippson wraps up his series of celebratory narratives with a Romantic tale of exotic travel, adventure, and triumph in the desert that renders the terror, torture, and intrigue of Inquisition fiction a distant memory which pales in comparison. Indeed, Sanzo first describes how after being sold into slavery in Tunisia, he earned his freedom and then, intrigued by rumors about Jews living a life of radical independence in the Sahara, set out to discover of a group of Jewish noble savages who were “crude, ignorant, [and] full of superstition” yet also “brave, upright, godfearing, [and] full of domestic virtue and innocence.”84 Practically as soon as he arrives among these “sons of the desert,” he is incorporated into their tribe, and like his two brothers, he also serves as an agent of benevolent modernization. He manages a deal with his former master to acquire up-to-date military technology (rifles), allowing the Beni Qurayza to achieve unprecedented military strength and stability. He himself unites the diverse tribes of the group, becoming the leader of an army of ten thousand warriors. And once their future is secured in this manner, Sanzo also becomes their teacher. The Beni Qurayza, he explains, possessed sacred scrolls passed down by their fathers centuries before, including the Torah, the Psalms, and the book of Isaiah. With only the most rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, however, they could not even begin to understand these texts, and the Judaism they practiced consisted largely of inherited customs cultivated over the eight centuries of their isolation from the rest of the Jewish world. With Sanzo’s help, nevertheless, the young men of this newly powerful independent nation study Hebrew, Torah, and Bible, and in

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

keeping with this vision of Jewish regeneration, Sanzo himself has been fruitful and multiplied. He falls in love with and marries the daughter of the chieftain of the Beni Qurayza, becoming the proud father of both two sons, who accompany him on his journey back to Spain, and two daughters who remain at home at their mother’s side. Philippson thus transforms Aguilar’s melancholy look back at the last of the Marranos into three narratives of tremendous hope for the modern Jewish world. Marie may die a martyr’s death, a victim of the Inquisition, at a moment when the “Middle Ages were already coming to a close” and “for the last time the departing sun of chivalry was illuminating the Spanish court with its rosy light.”85 The three Jews that go forth from Philippson’s vale of cedars, however, distinguish themselves by carrying on and surpassing the legacy of Spanish Jewry, whether as rabbis, statesmen, or military-political leaders. In the three very different worlds they move into, the Sephardic heritage certainly deserves to be remembered, but there is no need to do so with the typical excesses of Inquisition fiction. Instead, building on Aguilar’s grand historical romance, Philippson helps create a form of Jewish literature that completely renounces the sensationalism of the popular fascination with the terror and torture of the Inquisition and embraces instead the work of a future-oriented reflection on the past reminiscent of Schiller’s ideal of reflective or sentimental literature. Reprinted in Saron along with the Philippsons’ preface, “Die drei Brüder” was thus ready-made so that its readers would be able to identify it as an exemplar of the Philippsons’ own vision of literature that would give the Jewish experience the aesthetic form it required to enter into the modern era. In rewriting The Vale of Cedars in this manner, Philippson also transformed Aguilar’s refuge of feminine Jewish piety into an exclusively male domain, one that used Marie Morales’s domestic retreat to share tales of glory, grandeur, and triumph in the outside world. With the exception of Sanzo’s brood of four children in the far-away, exotic world of the Sahara, moreover, Philippson’s three sons of Spain leave behind no direct descendants. Abraham, we learn, was unlucky in love, and Jose’s wife and newborn son were brutally murdered by a rival when he was away on business in Istanbul. Like the conclusion of Die Marannen, Philippson’s vision of a Sephardic Jewry without direct progeny invites his German-Jewish readers to regard themselves as the

53

54

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

heirs to the world described in this novella. When seen in the context of German-Jewish historical fiction as a whole, nevertheless, the Sephardic legacy was hardly limited to the triumphant tales of male glory recounted in “Die drei Brüder.” German-Jewish writers, to be sure, produced plenty of literature celebrating the grandeur of Sephardic heroes such as the poets Jehuda Halevi and Abraham Ibn-Esra, the philosopher Moses Maimonides, or the traveler Benjamin of Tudela.86 In keeping with the emergent bourgeois cult of domesticity, however, they also celebrated the virtues of Jewish mothers and Jewish daughters. As we shall see in what follows, they created these idealized female heroines by building on revered works of high culture, producing works of fiction that despite their best efforts to foreground their proximity to the German classics often revealed precisely the profound dependence on popular literature and sensationalist melodrama Philippson was so eager to disavow.

“The Most Sublime Temple of the Divinity”: Female Virtue in the Company of Shakespeare and Lessing? In his pioneering work on German-Jewish historical fiction, Jonathan Skolnik has explored how both the classical dramas of Goethe and Schiller and the genre of the bourgeois tragedy served as crucial “intertexts” for the German-Jewish historical novel, that is, literary models that Jewish writers adopted and adapted to create fictional accounts of Jewish history that might appear to be part and parcel of an emerging German national culture.87 In Jakob Tirado, for instance, Philippson has his title figure echo the final speeches of Goethe’s Egmont (1788), aligning his novel with Goethe’s celebrated masterpiece and rendering his former Marrano protagonist’s celebration of religious tolerance in the Netherlands the equivalent of Egmont’s passionate struggle against religious reaction. As Skolnik notes, it was often the “vocabulary established on the German stage” that was used to legitimize “the dramatized defense of the Jewish religion” so central to German-Jewish historical fiction.88 And Jewish writers were hardly always content to rest in the shadow of the German classics. They often sought to issue correctives to the visions of the past promoted by Goethe and Schiller.

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

In Die Familie Y Aguillar, for instance, when Lehmann’s narrator finds himself at the royal residence at Aranjuez, he takes advantage of the opportunity to point out to his readers that the “hero of freedom and virtue” immortalized in Schiller’s Don Carlos (1787) bears little resemblance to his historical precursor. Rather, we are told, the real Don Carlos was a dedicated servant of the Inquisition, an enemy of the Jews who had “apart from title and name nothing to do with the creation of Schiller’s imagination.”89 Within the texts we have been considering, such strategic positioning vis-à-vis German high culture had the function of deflecting attention even further away from the popular literary models that fiction about the Inquisition inevitably drew on. In terms of its fast-paced plot, intrigue, and melodrama—not to mention its hackneyed descriptions of the pleasures of life and the thrills of bullfights in “sunny Spain”— Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar differed little from Leibrock’s Der Cardinal and other sensationalist treatments of the Black Legend.90 It may not come as a surprise, as we shall see in Chapter 4, that in his voluminous oeuvre of novels and novellas about contemporary Jewish life, this “John Grisham of the Orthodox world” had a penchant for narratives about unsolved crimes that featured orthodox rabbis as detectives.91 Against this backdrop, passages like the one quoted in the preceding paragraph served not just to engage with dominant visions of history to ensure Jews a prominent place as victims of the Inquisition. They also put Jewish historical fiction in the company of the German classics, using an explicit dialogue with canonical works of literature to lend their own narratives the veneer and authority of high culture. As we shall see in this section, however, this enterprise was not without its tensions, and despite their best efforts to present their fiction as the epitome of high culture, German-Jewish novelists of the Inquisition often descended back into precisely the type of sensationalist melodrama they sought to disclaim.92 Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, we shall see, serves as a perfect example of this dynamic. In writing Jakob Tirado, Philippson drew liberally on founding legends of the Amsterdam Jewish community that were formulated by Daniel Levi de Barrios in the 1670s and widely echoed in contemporary historical sources such as his son-in-law Meyer Kayserling’s 1859 book, Sephardim.93 In its basic contours, the story Philippson

55

56

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

tells is precisely the celebratory myth he inherited from de Barrios, a tale devoid of all ambivalence in which former Marranos deeply committed to Judaism escape from Portugal and revert to their ancestral faith at the first possible juncture. But Philippson also expands on de Barrios in crucial ways. On the one hand, he superimposes the life story of Jakob Tirado onto that of another historical figure, the heretical Franciscan monk Diego de la Ascension, whom Kayserling reports being burned alive in Lisbon in 1603.94 In Jakob Tirado, the Franciscan friar meets a different fate: he pays a life-changing visit to the San Benito church in Toledo—formerly the celebrated El Transito synagogue—where he is suddenly connected to childhood memories of being a secret Jew. He subsequently commits himself with passion to the religion of his Marrano ancestors to become Jakob Tirado.95 It is, however, the personal history that Philippson invents for his female protagonist Marie Nunes that ends up being crucial for the way in which he sets up his novel to reflect on its own status as literature. Building on de Barrios, Philippson tells the story of Marie Nunes’s beauty being so admired in England that she was courted by Duke Neville of Devonshire and proudly driven around in a carriage by Queen Elizabeth. De Barrios reports that this virtuous heroine refused to “yield to amorous entreaties of honorific and alluring gifts,” rejecting both the duke’s and the queen’s attentions so that she could travel to Amsterdam, revert to Judaism, and help found a flourishing community of former conversos there.96 Historians such as Miriam Bodian have debunked this tale along with much else in de Barrios as myth, as the attempt of Jews in late seventeenth-century Amsterdam to promote an idealized account of their community’s origins.97 Philippson and his contemporaries, however, took many of these tales at face value, and he chose to develop this incident further, organizing it around an interlude dealing with a “certain young actor, named Shakespeare, who as a dramatist was already enjoying the greatest approval and fame.”98 Revered by German literati from Lessing and Herder to Goethe and the Schlegel brothers, Shakespeare was nearly as important for the nineteenth-century German stage as were Goethe and Schiller.99 By casting his novel as an authoritative source about the celebrated British bard, Philippson ensured that Jakob Tirado would be taken seriously as literature, and he went further, giving his readers the privilege of attending

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

an original performance at the Globe Theater in London. In a scene reminiscent of The Vale of Cedars, Philippson creates a relationship between Marie Nunes and Queen Elizabeth much like that between Marie Morales and Queen Isabella. Indeed, he has Marie Nunes become a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, a character familiar to readers of German literature from Schiller’s classical drama Maria Stuart (1802). The queen herself compares Marie Nunes to the title figure of Schiller’s drama, noting, of course, that Marie is much purer and more innocent that her former rival Mary Queen of Scots, and coming as she does from her “southern homeland,” Marie is drawn to England as a secure and stable society that appears to be ruled by law and committed to justice.100 Like Queen Isabella in Aguilar’s novel, moreover, Elizabeth feels that the bonds of friendship make it her responsibility to attempt to convert her ward and make an honest Christian out of her. It is with this hope that she takes Marie to the theater, to see Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Marie Nunes, like Aguilar’s protagonist, is hardly the ideal candidate for such evangelical efforts. Indeed, earlier in the novel, during one of her impassioned speeches in Portugal about the need to reject the dissimulation and hypocrisy of Marrano life and find a homeland where she and her family might be able to live openly as Jews and thereby prove themselves worthy of God’s love and protection, the narrator referred to her explicitly and proudly as an “angry prophetess.”101 When the performance begins at the Globe, to be sure, our passionate daughter of Israel is initially taken in by the theater and enthralled by Shakespeare’s art and magic. As soon as she sees Shylock, however, “cold shudders trickled through her limbs, and a spasm choked her up with fear.”102 The play’s positive portrayal of Shylock’s daughter Jessica happily betraying her father and converting to Christianity outrages her even further, and Philippson’s “angry prophetess” quickly becomes disgusted both by Shakespeare’s misuse of the stage to promote anti-Judaism and by the queen’s obvious strategy in taking her to the theater. She subsequently withdraws from the life of the court, feigning illness. Later, Queen Elizabeth is angered by Marie Nunes’s refusal to accept the hand of the duke, even though she admires her steadfastness, and she orders the Marranos gone within four weeks. As Skolnik has argued, Marie Nunes’s escape to England from Iberia

57

58

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

reverses the famous Rebecca plot line in Scott’s Ivanhoe.103 In doing so, it also echoes the final scene of The Vale of Cedars that was deleted from the German edition of the text that Philippson helped distribute. But for Philippson, England clearly represents a way-station on his heroine’s travels that is important because it enables the novel to promote itself and its literary merits. Philippson gives his nineteenth-century German readers the vicarious experience of attending an original Shakespeare performance at the Globe at the same time as he helps them embrace the proper degree of distance from Shakespeare. Here as well it is through classical drama that the German-Jewish novel encourages fidelity to Judaism and Jewish tradition. But Philippson sets Jakob Tirado in critical dialogue with Shakespeare, casting his historical novel as both an authoritative source about Shakespeare and, implicitly, an alternative form of literature as well, one infinitely better suited to Jewish readers than The Merchant of Venice. Philippson introduces his Marrano heroine as the antithesis of Shakespeare’s Jessica, creating a historical novel about Jewish virtue that seeks to surpass Shakespeare’s drama about the Venetian Jewish moneylender and his apostate daughter. Whether or not Jakob Tirado actually represented the “masterpiece equal to the best products of modern German literature” that Kayserling claimed it did may be a question worth debating, as we shall see shortly. But through its echoes of Egmont and its critical dialogue with The Merchant of Venice, Philippson’s novel certainly claimed to represent German literature of the highest possible order—literature that drew its inspiration from Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Jewish history rather than from sensationalist accounts of the Black Legend. Ultimately, however, Jakob Tirado is interesting because of the way it subverts its own attempts to pass as high culture, and here as well, the liberties that Philippson takes in his rewriting of the legends he inherits from de Barrios are crucial for understanding how this novel reflects on its own status as literature. Throughout Jakob Tirado, Marie Nunes’s steadfast commitment to Judaism commands practically as much of the reader’s attention as Tirado’s more active efforts on behalf of his fellow Jews and the rest of humanity. In the aftermath of the visceral rejection of Shakespeare that carves out a space for German-Jewish historical fiction to tout its own virtues as literature, the angry prophetess herself achieves, with her own life story, the perfect antithesis of the fate of

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

Shakespeare’s Jessica. In Jakob Tirado—and this is a pure fabrication, a part of Philippson’s fictional world that had no precedent in de Barrios—the triumphant creation of an open Jewish community in Amsterdam goes hand in hand with the blossoming of romance and the creation of domestic bliss between Marie Nunes and Jakob Tirado.104 Philippson thus arranges the plot of Jakob Tirado so that it ends like any conventional novel should, with marriage, with female virtue rewarded, and the coupling he orchestrates prominently marks his novel as the antithesis of The Merchant of Venice. Marie does more than simply refuse to follow in the footsteps of Shakespeare’s Jessica. She marries a man whom her pious mother Mayor Rodrigues regards as both a son and as an explicit replacement for her late husband and Marie’s father, Gaspar Lopez Homen.105 Gaspar Lopez Homen, incidentally, is the only character in Jakob Tirado who felt no conflict in reconciling external Catholicism with intense and sincere devotion to Judaism, and he died and was buried, appropriately, in a hidden refuge in Portugal. In marrying Tirado and settling into an openly Jewish life in Amsterdam, then, Marie Nunes both carries on and surpasses her paternal legacy, becoming precisely the inspiring female figure her example trained Philippson’s readers to find so conspicuously absent in Shakespeare. In this way, this literary figure who surpasses Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Shakespeare’s Jessica, and Scott’s Rebecca becomes the patron saint and symbolic mother of the Amsterdam Jewish community. Philippson obviously promotes a patriarchal fantasy of femininity here, a Jewish version of the cult of domesticity celebrating the power and agency that women enjoy within marriage that was destined to speak to the bourgeois ideals of womanhood many of his middle-class Jewish readers were in the process of embracing.106 The passionate Jewish prophetess who is the protagonist of Jakob Tirado finds ultimate fulfillment in marrying a man whom his novel marks—positively, and without any irony—as an explicit replacement for her own father. By the time Philippson’s novel appeared in 1867, moreover, the notion that Romantic love might lead young women away from the will of their fathers had earned a firmly established place in German high culture, a stock element of the “bourgeois tragedy” pioneered by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and performed often on the nineteenth-century German stage in productions of Lessing’s Emilia

59

60

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

Galotti (1772), Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (1784), Friedrich Hebbel’s Maria Magdalene (1844), and numerous other works. An eighteenthcentury genre whose great innovation consisted in portraying the domestic sphere of the intimate family as a site for tragedy of the highest possible order, bourgeois tragedy typically thrived on conflicts between daughters and their fathers, on eruptions of sexuality and desire that collided with the domestic forms of intimacy prized by the nuclear family.107 The happily-ever-after world that emerges at the conclusion of Jakob Tirado, however, hardly explores the crisis in patriarchal authority that the bourgeois tragedies of Lessing and others so famously brought to the foreground. Philippson’s protagonist, instead, empowers herself by marrying the equivalent of her own father. This German-Jewish historical novel may indeed present itself as an improvement on Shakespeare, a triumphant tale about refugees from the Inquisition that owes more to Goethe’s Egmont than to the sensationalism of Inquisition fiction. In the final analysis, however, its overly harmonious depiction of patriarchal family life represents a dramatic descent into the world of sentimental melodrama with its penchant for happy endings, marking Jakob Tirado as a novel than cannot even begin to grapple with the complexities of bourgeois family life that canonical bourgeois tragedies called so much attention to. Some readers today, to be sure, might discern hints of incest in the way Philippson imagines the patriarchal family replicating itself and transferring itself so seamlessly from Iberia to the Netherlands. In the context of Philippson’s novel itself, however, the love that Marie and Tirado share is clearly intended to be both celebrated without qualification and entirely noncontroversial—evidence for its readers that deep commitments to Judaism help guarantee the type of Romantic love routinely glorified in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. Indeed, even as late as 1904, a prominent essay on Philippson in the Jewish cultural magazine Ost und West praised Jakob Tirado as an exciting, suspenseful, and magnificent novel that ended with its title figure finding “domestic bliss alongside the beautiful Marie Nunes.”108 In rewriting Shakespeare in Jakob Tirado, Philippson had as little use for the complexities of bourgeois family life as he did for sensationalist tales of lecherous inquisitors and gratuitous accounts of secret torture chambers. In their place, he delivered his readers a triumphant love story that ultimately looked more like

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

a watered-down version of the best-selling popular romance novels of Eugenie Marlitt than a canonical bourgeois tragedy or a great German novel that might boast a place alongside Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.109 Indeed, in its hackneyed glorification of love, marriage, and family life, Jakob Tirado certainly bears at least some resemblance to the phenomenon that Munich art dealers and painters in the 1860s and 1870s were beginning to write off with the neologism “kitsch.”110 Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen is important in this context because it engages even more explicitly with the tradition of the bourgeois tragedy to create its ideals of Jewish femininity, doing so, as we have noted before, alongside a much more unequivocal debt to the typical excesses of Inquisition fiction. Here too, we shall see, we have Jewish historical fiction that ultimately subverts its own claims to be equal to high culture. In this sense, Die Marannen brings to the foreground many of the constitutive tensions of middlebrow literature that Ludwig Philippson sought so assiduously to avoid in his fiction. Unlike Marie Nunes, Phöbus Philippson’s eighteen-year old Dinah is indeed “seized by the omnipotent power of love.”111 In the aftermath of the fall of Granada and the death of her beloved Torah-scribe father Nissa, she finds herself deeply attracted to a Mandolin-playing, secular-minded Christian nobleman named Alonzo, a figure who resembles one of those “statues that the great artists of antiquity left behind of their sublime deities, in which dead stone conjures up the living expression of spirit.” Indeed, Alonzo is often compared to a Greek sculpture in descriptions reminiscent of the celebrated eighteenth-century German classicist Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Despite her insistence that “the cross of faith stands between us,” Dinah too sees Alonzo in precisely this manner, as an exemplar of classical beauty shot through with erotic energy she finds difficult to resist.112 Dinah’s name, of course, evokes the biblical figure raped by Shechem in Genesis.113 Yet like Lessing’s Emilia Galotti and the numerous other heroines of bourgeois tragedy, Philippson’s Dinah is neither violated nor the victim of violence. For her, as in the famous passage from Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, “seduction is the true violence,”114 and her sincerely felt attraction to the secular Spaniard who embodies the aesthetic standards of German classicism poses a fundamental threat to her paternal legacy. In keeping with the valorization of female piety and domestic forms

61

62

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

of Judaism that became typical for German Jews as they adopted and adapted bourgeois behavioral norms and mentalities,115 Philippson’s novella portrays Judaism as a product of familial intimacy where women have a particularly central role to play. Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath of the siege of Granada, Dinah and her widowed father are described as inhabiting a bourgeois idyll of domestic bliss, with any stranger apparently able to recognize at first sight “the domestic care of a female being” who keeps the house “pure and clean,” maintains “a brilliantly white floor,” and keeps an eye on “her beloved father with tender attention” as he studies Jewish texts.116 In this initial scene, to be sure, this idealized Hausfrau—who “even though she is of German origin . . . outshines the daughters of Sepharad in grace and virtue”—happily occupies a subordinate position in the home and in a Jewish world that roots the authority of men in the study of sacred texts.117 But even while her father is dying, Dinah begins to emerge from her domestic retreat, transgressing Jewish legal codes about the separation of the sexes in the synagogue to speak directly with the head rabbi of Granada.118 The fact that Dinah’s father dies just pages after the initial description of her domestic bliss and housekeeping talents, moreover, dramatically catapults Philippson’s heroine into new circumstances, making bourgeois tragedy’s traditional friction between fathers and daughters into an internal conflict, one in which Dinah is accountable to herself. On his deathbed, even Dinah’s Torah-scribe father seems to abandon traditional Jewish gender hierarchies and valorize women’s religiosity. Taking enormous comfort in her prayers on his behalf and for the Jews of Granada, he explains to her that “the breast of the chaste and childlike virgin is the most sublime Temple of the divinity”; he then announces that he has only five things to leave her: “your innocent heart, your feminine honor, the holy religion of our fathers, the memory of your father—and your fate.”119 The paternal legacy that Nissa bequeaths to Dinah, then, reads like a Jewish version of the virginal and pure femininity so famously idealized in Goethe’s classical drama Iphigenie auf Tauris (1786). Goethe’s drama rewrote Euripides to foreground the curative effects of the innate religiosity of women and the ideal of moral autonomy rather than the intervention of Greek deities in the world of human affairs. Left by her father the mistress of her own fate, Dinah gains autonomy, that is, the

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

freedom to maintain her chaste purity, innocence, and honor so that she might continue to serve as the temple of the divine her father exhorts her to be. Clearly, this celebration of women’s direct access to God represents an innovation within Jewish tradition, one very much in line with the ideals of women’s allegedly natural propensity for religious piety that played into the nineteenth-century bourgeois cult of domesticity. It will hardly be surprising that once her father passes away, Dinah manages to end up, with the help of Abarbanel, working in the home of the enlightened Jewish physician David Arama, where she acts as a governess and substitute mother for his two young children. It is in this context, moreover, that she has an experience that Goethe’s virgin priestess of moral autonomy never does: she comes into contact with and falls in love with Alonzo, whose resemblance to classical sculptures of pagan Gods and complete lack of religiosity mark him as Dinah’s radically secular male counterpart. With Dinah’s challenges laid out as they are, it should hardly be surprising that her attraction to Alonzo deeply disturbs “the power of her paternal faith” and the “zephyr wind of her domestic peace.”120 Ultimately, however, once her father’s portrait comes tumbling down from the wall and Dr. Arama is suddenly arrested by officers of the Inquisition, she finds the inner strength to “violently tear the picture of her beloved out from her breast.”121 She subsequently becomes precisely the temple of divinity her father intended her to be. Reading about Deborah’s heroic deeds in the Bible, she is filled with new inspiration for her faith and sets off for the synagogue. Once there, she self-consciously enters into traditionally male space once again, kissing the Torah scrolls and ascending up to the altar where she—like Marie Nunes—acts as a modern-day prophetess, giving passionate speeches that inspire her fellow Jews with hope.122 In Die Marannen, even more so than in Jakob Tirado, then, we have a case of a woman character fulfilling her destiny by actively carrying on her paternal legacy. The fact that Phöbus Philippson explicitly creates this model of femininity through the plot lines of a bourgeois tragedy makes it only all the more striking. Indeed, Dinah explains clearly to Alonzo before she leaves Spain in the company of Abarbanel: “’Yes, I love you, I love you with all the glow of first love that a maiden is capable of. But my lot is renunciation. I go along with my people and

63

64

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

their misery. . . . I cannot, I am not allowed to become yours. For the sake of my father’s memory,’ she added, looking up with the transfigured vision of an angel, ‘I cannot become yours.’”123 The narrator, to be sure, makes clear that Dinah’s heart is “broken,” explaining to the reader that “love blooms in woman but once in life, at which point it can become the fruitful dew of heaven for one’s entire life. But if an external storm destroys the tender plant, the seed of life will live on but only produce foliage and leaves, no flowers.”124 Dinah herself, however, has little difficulty healing. Unable to fulfill her paternal legacy through romantic love, Philippson’s virtuous heroine subsequently returns to the position of daughter and lives happily ever after looking after Isaac Abarbanel. Completely desexualized, she becomes precisely the eternally chaste virgin her father saw in her: “And the faithful companion in his exile, Dinah, always stood at his side. For the third time she performed her childlike duty, fulfilling the beautiful commandment of the law. The storm of passion had disappeared from her chaste breast and she emerged victorious.”125 Philippson delivers his readers, then, an extreme version of the triumph of patriarchal visions of femininity, one that seems almost a caricature of the problems explored in Lessing and Schiller’s bourgeois tragedies. Dinah lives happily ever after as the eternal daughter, finding victory in the triumph over her erotic attachment to Alonzo. In a conclusion that would have been enormously pleasing to any number of the fathers in the bourgeois tragedies whose plots lines proved far too complicated for Philippson’s purposes, Dinah maintains her childlike purity and chastity, dedicating her life to honoring Nissa’s legacy, her new father, Abarbanel, and the religion of her fathers more generally. Die Marannen, to be sure, is not devoid of tragedy. We learn at the conclusion of the text, for instance, that agents of the Inquisition baptized Dr. Arama’s two children after their father perished; we see Abarbanel’s son Jehudah forced underground as the leader of a band of Marranos before he finally makes his way to Corfu a decade later; and in many ways, the entire novella unfolds against the backdrop of the vivid spectacle of a huge group of Marranos being burned alive outside the gates of Granada that Philippson’s narrator describes in excruciating detail in the fourth chapter. Ultimately, however, the tale Philippson tells is one of triumph, the tale of Dinah’s evolution into an icon of Jewish

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

femininity inspiring his nineteenth-century readers to hold true to their ancient faith and seek that perfect balance between Judaism and secular culture that she and her German-born father enjoyed, for such a brief period, in Muslim Spain. Like his brother Ludwig, then, Phöbus Philippson ultimately had no use for the complexities of bourgeois tragedy. Instead, he delivered his readers literature that celebrated the resilience of Judaism and the Jewish family by both drawing on and simplifying the literature of the German classics, creating hackneyed idylls of bourgeois domesticity unable to tolerate irony or complexity of any sort. The middlebrow literature produced by the Philippson brothers had little patience for exploring the crises in patriarchal authority or the conflicts of bourgeois family life so famously probed by bourgeois tragedy. Marie Nunes ends up marrying a man who embodies and surpasses the legacy of her father, and Dinah also ends up happily ever after with a paternal upgrade, herself transfigured into the guardian angel of German Jewry as she serves as the eternal daughter to a figure celebrated as the epitome of Sephardic Jewry. In this way, Die Marannen comes to embrace the black-and-white ethical universe so typical of nineteenth-century melodrama, creating yet another constellation of Jews from Iberia whom German Jews might adopt as their spiritual ancestors. The fact that this happens in a novella that partakes so fully of the detailed descriptions of torture and persecution so characteristic of popular literature about the Inquisition only underscores precisely those debts to sensationalist fiction that Ludwig Philippson may have liked to downplay. And if we take seriously the recollections of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums that we cited at the beginning of the chapter, mid-nineteenth-century German Jews certainly knew how to respond to this dimension of Phöbus Philippson’s fiction, racing through installments of Die Marannen as they surrendered themselves to the pleasures of reading suspensedriven popular fiction.

Middlebrow Literature and Its Virtues While publishing his brother’s Die Marannen in the inaugural volume of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Philippson also pre-

65

66

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

sented his readers with an essay of his own, in serialized form, reflecting on the mission of both his paper and the emergent German-Jewish public sphere as a whole. Countering some critics’ claims that Jewish newspapers would by their nature promote separatism and erect new ghetto walls, Philippson passionately defended both the right and the need for a vibrant public forum where all matters concerning Jews and Judaism would be discussed openly, “in broad sunlight,” for all the world to see.126 Celebrating the nineteenth century as an era in which culture and Bildung were gradually triumphing over prejudice and where equal rights for Jews and an “amalgamation” of Jews with other peoples now seemed inevitable, he reflected explicitly on the role of Jewish literature in creating forms of Judaism appropriate for the modern world. Echoing the influential theories of Johann Gottfried Herder, he insisted that “the literature of the Jewish people began with the existence of the people itself (the Bible)” and he celebrated Jewish writers historically as the “spiritual midwives” of the “nation.127 Ultimately, however, Herder’s vision of national culture was of limited use to Philippson in reflecting on the mission of a hybrid, GermanJewish public sphere. Indeed, he noted with pleasure that the “national” dimensions of Judaism were slowly but surely loosing ground in the modern era, allowing Judaism as a religion to come into its own. And as he characterized it, the present historical moment is rife with possibilities for a Jewish literary renaissance analogous to what Jews in past eras accomplished writing in Greek and Arabic while immersed in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Spain. Taking its cue from “European culture [Bildung]” and the “perspective of the present day,” modern Jewish literature has the potential to achieve a “mastery of expression” that would far surpass the “bombast and sumptuous imagery” of the “Oriental type” characteristic of Jewish literature from antiquity.128 The concept of literature Philippson was subscribing to was an inclusive one, embracing history, theology, and ultimately journalism itself, all of which served the purpose of helping modern European Jews gain self-consciousness in a public forum such as the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums. Within this context, as he conceded, only belles lettres occupied a potentially problematic position: Belles lettres is a branch of our paper whose purpose we must discuss

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

here briefly so that we avoid the vain reproach that its purpose is merely that of entertainment. Belles lettres has led Jews and Judaism to be regarded with a certain contempt by Jews and non-Jews alike, always bringing Jews and Judaism into the public eye in an unaesthetic form that does not conform to modern culture [Bildung]. Wherever one goes, one always encounters commoners who do not know how to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, smiling whenever they hear something that deals even remotely with Jews. This has got to change! And thank God it is already changing in many ways. Whatever one wants to say about recent Jewish preachers, they are awakening respect and esteem for Judaism in the younger generation through their cultured [ gebildete], appropriate form and language. This is an invaluable accomplishment. And the author knows this not just from his individual position but from hearing from many older rabbis as well. The belles lettres of this paper strives for precisely the same goal and deserves thus our double consideration. By representing the teachings, the history, and the entire spirit of Judaism in poetic form, in aesthetic garb, belles lettres gains tremendously in validity and brings back lost souls to Judaism. Belles lettres, moreover, has a special ability to promote inspiration, enthusiasm and the elevated pouring forth of the excited mind in a most appropriate fashion, without being written off as separatism.129

Countering the specter that fiction serves to do little more than allow its readers to indulge in the pleasure of reading, Philippson claims for belles lettres a crucial role in granting Judaism the acceptable aesthetic form it so desperately needs in the modern era. In the world he describes, content is inextricable from form, and the unflattering light in which Jews and Judaism are typically represented in contemporary belles lettres is to some extent responsible for the widespread contempt that Judaism suffers among non-Jews and among many Jews as well. Fiction that grants the Jewish experience the noble aesthetic form it deserves thus has a vital function to play not just in making Judaism palatable but in rendering it a source of inspiration for Jews and nonJews alike. Judaism has the untapped potential, in other words, to be recognized as part and parcel of modern European culture, and belles lettres is in a unique position to ensure that Judaism will take on the aesthetic form necessary to make this happen. As marginal as it might seem to those who write fiction off as mere entertainment or see the

67

68

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

development of specifically Jewish forms of literature as an attempt to construct new ghetto walls, German-Jewish historical fiction is thus a phenomenon of the greatest cultural significance. By serializing Die Marannen in its inaugural volume, Philippson’s newspaper was prominently positioning itself at the cultural vanguard of the Jewish world. In the context of our analysis of German-Jewish fiction about the Spanish Inquisition in this chapter, these remarks are important because they underscore yet again the serious cultural work that elites like Philippson confidently expected Jewish historical fiction to perform. Our analysis of this body of literature has certainly brought to the fore discrepancies between this literature’s rhetorical strategies of aligning itself with high culture and its indebtedness to popular literary forms that Philippson would have consigned to the realm of mere entertainment. The ultimate point of this analysis, however, has not been to discredit this literature, revealing its blind spots so that we might debunk its claims to grandeur almost two centuries after the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums began to supply its eager readership with Jewish historical fiction. The contradictions in this literature are important, rather, because they provide crucial insight into the functions this literature performed for its readers. In this context, we have seen that if this literature subverts its own claims to be worthy of the company of Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Lessing, it does so in large part because of its clear ideological agenda, because the unequivocal commitments to Judaism it sought to foster were far more compatible with the black-and-white ethical universe of sentimental melodrama and an unequivocal celebration of bourgeois family life than with the complexities of Lessing’s or Schiller’s bourgeois tragedies. Rather than being a sign of its weakness, then, this literature’s versatility in combining obvious debts to high cultural forms with sensationalist melodrama may be the key to understanding its historical function. Its reliance on popular narratives about the Inquisition could be used to ensure Jews a prominent place in cultural memory as the ultimate victims of the Inquisition, a people with a rich history of integration into non-Jewish societies that triumphed despite the tragedies of 1492—and a people whose story could be told in an “aesthetic garb” that was reminiscent of, and engaged explicitly with, works of literature regarded as classics of modern German culture. In this sense, middlebrow literature

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

could be enormously productive in enabling German Jews to embrace and balance multiple identities. This literature was not merely European in form and Jewish in content. Both the stories it told about the Inquisition and the forms it used to tell these stories were deeply indebted to both high and popular culture, enabling this fiction to occupy a flexible and dynamic middle ground that could result in distinctly Jewish pageturners that might boast the veneer of high culture. Obviously, we have seen, this literature could tolerate little ambivalence when it came to its ideological commitments. German-Jewish historical fiction about the Inquisition took itself and its mission extremely seriously, lacking all irony in the way it adapted and vulgarized high cultural models. But rather than highlighting these characteristic features of German-Jewish historical fiction as flaws and indicting this body of literature for lacking self-consciousness, we should recognize the productive functions it played in transforming the Jewish past into German literature that certainly seemed to be giving Judaism the aesthetic form that leading rabbis like Ludwig Philippson felt it desperately needed to thrive in the modern era. In this context, the fact that when it came to dramatizing its commitment to Judaism this literature almost inevitably lacked the formal or thematic complexity of the classics it imitated was perhaps less a weakness than the great cultural accomplishment of German-Jewish Inquisition fiction. When German-Jewish writers began producing historical fiction in the 1830s, they very self-consciously entered into a bifurcated literary landscape, dealing with subject matter that decidedly did not belong to the realm of high culture and making use of a literary genre that was the most popular product circulating in and out of commercial lending libraries. For German Jews, accordingly, there was little fear that this middlebrow literature written self-consciously in the shadow of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Shakespeare was going to dislodge the power or authority of high culture. Obviously, these middlebrow German-Jewish classics, whatever their popularity, never became a presence in German literary life rivaling the 20,000 copies of Goethe’s Faust that Reclam put on the market the same year as Philippson published Jakob Tirado. But they offered their Jewish readers the pleasures of reading literature that did much more that vulgarize high culture, fiction that made passionate commitments to Judaism and heroic resistance to

69

70

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

the Inquisition the subject matter of literature that was self-consciously designed to read like the texts that cultural elites were enshrining as the epitome of great art. In this sense, our analysis of German-Jewish fiction about the Spanish Inquisition drives home the power that such literature could wield in launching a vibrant literary culture for a group moving into the ranks of the middle classes. From Kant on, German theorists of culture inevitably stressed the universality of aesthetic experience, conceiving of the aesthetic domain as a disinterested realm that allowed human beings to experience their pure humanity and rise above the contingencies of the empirical world.130 Against this backdrop, it may be telling that whatever its longstanding appeal to Jews, German-Jewish historical fiction never entered mainstream literary life to find a broad audience. The Jewish periodicals and Jewish book series that disseminated this literature, of course, were theoretically accessible to all. Yet for the most part the general reading public took little interest in the heroics of Jewish historical fiction.131 Whatever its success among Jewish readers, the claims that this literature inevitably made to universality proved difficult to uphold in practice—yet another indication of the discrepancy between this literature’s strategic alignment with high culture and its practical commitments to fostering a level of commitment to normative Judaism that non-Jews understandably had little use for. Indeed, German-Jewish historical fiction in Yiddish and Hebrew translation eventually came to enjoy an extended shelf life in Eastern Europe, pre-state Palestine, and the modern state of Israel.132 Precisely what made this fiction function so well as German-Jewish middlebrow literature, however, clearly set it at odds with the visions of universality so constitutive of German high culture in the nineteenth century. The anxieties about “separatism” that Philippson voiced in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837 were thus anything but groundless. The universality that German-Jewish fiction claimed for itself proved eternally elusive, and much to Philippson’s dismay, as we shall see in Chapter 2, when it came to German-Jewish literature, historical fiction was not without its competitors. In turning to the genre of the ghetto tale so often identified with the Bohemian-born writer Leopold Kompert in the following chapter, we will be considering a literary genre that also sought to negotiate a suitable aesthetic form for the Jewish

Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition

past and transform the Jewish experience into literature of the highest order. Yet unlike historical fiction, ghetto tales sought to mediate between Jews and non-Jews, explicitly speaking to precisely the general public whose interest the German-Jewish historical novel failed to capture. Ghetto literature, to be sure, was not without its critics, but at least for several decades in the mid-nineteenth century, it represented a radically different sort of middlebrow fiction from the historical novel: a type of literature that Jews and non-Jews alike accepted as exemplary of the best that contemporary German literature had to offer.

71

Tw o  Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of

Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past

Schiller’s Ghetto, or Tales from the Judengasse

72

The celebration of the Sephardic experience that we explored in the preceding chapter helped sustain a vision of a Jewish past that nineteenth-century German Jews could look back on with a sense of pride and ownership. In its fictionalized form, Spanish-Jewish history offered countless tales of heroism and martyrdom that exemplified Judaism’s compatibility with secular culture in the past and that also testified to its potential, in the present, to produce historical fiction that might claim to be literature of the highest order. As Ismar Schorsch has noted, German Jewry’s romance with the Sephardic experience had another crucial function. Stressing the elective affinity between themselves and their Iberian forebears enabled Jews in Germany to disassociate themselves from both contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe and their own Ashkenazic past.1 Particularly when it comes to belles lettres, however, it can be misleading to grant too much importance to this quest for German-Jewish exceptionalism. Historical fiction emphasizing a distant heroic Jewish past may have been the preferred literary genre of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and the dominant form of fiction promoted and distributed by the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, the pioneering Jewish book club that Ludwig Philippson helped found. By and large, however, the most prevalent form of literature produced and consumed by German Jews in the nineteenth century was a genre that concerned itself prominently and explicitly with the immediate Ashkenazic past: the genre of the ghetto tale popularized in the mid-nineteenth century by Leopold Kompert (1822–1886).

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Starting with his breakout volume Aus dem Ghetto (From the Ghetto, 1848), Kompert’s tales were largely set in the Jewish districts of Bohemia, in the Czech lands, the region in the Austrian Empire that he himself hailed from before settling in Vienna and establishing himself as a writer. Kompert was not the first bard of the Jewish ghetto, but following the publication of Aus dem Ghetto and his sequel volumes—Böhmische Juden (Bohemian Jews, 1851), Neue Geschichten aus dem Ghetto (New Stories from the Ghetto, 1860), and Geschichten einer Gasse (Stories from the [Jew’s] Alley, 1864)—he became one of the most popular authors of ghetto tales. His works went through numerous editions in the nineteenth century, enjoyed a wide readership, and were translated into many languages including Czech, Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Romanian, and Yiddish.2 Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Tales, 1843) was one of Kompert’s models, and like Auerbach, Kompert wrote tales that sought to impart to the general public a picture of the dignity and humanity of provincial life. Following Auerbach’s liberal model of a Volksliteratur (popular literature) that would appeal to the general public of middle-class readers, Kompert focused his readers’ attentions not on rural life in the Black Forest but on traditional Jewish communities inhabiting a world beginning to be touched by the forces of secularization, urban migration, emancipation, and acculturation. Itta Shedletzky has estimated that close to half of the fiction published in the pages of German-Jewish newspapers during the mid- to late-nineteenth century consisted of ghetto tales,3 and Kompert, we shall see, had more than his share of Jewish readers. His tales themselves, however, were produced and marketed for a readership unfamiliar with both Jews and the tradition-bound world of Ashkenazic Judaism he sought to capture in his fiction. From Aus dem Ghetto on, he always supplied ample footnotes translating Yiddish and Hebrew expressions, explaining religious rituals, and making the world of traditional Jewish folkways accessible to readers unacquainted with Jewish tradition. As Kompert claimed later in life, “It is as a German poet that I went into the Bohemian ghetto, and I have not written a line without envisioning—indeed, wishing for—all Germans as readers.”4 The grand aspirations that Kompert harbored for his fiction underscore just how different ghetto tales were from the literature we stud-

73

74

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

ied in the preceding chapter. Inquisition fiction was produced almost exclusively by rabbis and members of the Jewish educational elite and distributed largely to Jewish readers through Jewish publication venues. Unlike Philippson, Kompert was not a rabbi, and he was known primarily as a writer. He participated in Jewish communal life in Vienna and did his share of publishing in Jewish periodicals, such as the Kalendar und Jahrbuch für Israeliten, a popular Jewish almanac launched by Isidor Busch in 1842 and later edited by Kompert himself. For the most part, however, his fiction targeted a much broader public. F. W. Grunow, the Leipzig press that published the first edition of Aus dem Ghetto in 1848, produced few other books of specifically Jewish interest during this period or subsequently. The same goes for both Jasper, Hügel & Manz in Vienna, which published Böhmische Juden three years later, as well as for the publishers of many of the subsequent reprintings of these two volumes and Kompert’s other works throughout the nineteenth century. Tellingly, the authoritative, ten-volume edition of Kompert’s complete works that came out in 1906, more than twenty years after Kompert’s death, was published by Max Hesse in Leipzig, a prominent, mainstream publishing house known for its successful editions of the classics, Romantics, and major nineteenth-century writers.5 Kompert reached a much broader readership than the fiction that Jews like Philippson wrote for a Jewish public, and the genre of the ghetto tale that he did so much to popularize has enjoyed a longevity that surpasses that of all other forms of Jewish literature that emerged in nineteenth-century Germany. In the German-speaking world, works by Aron Bernstein, Eduard Kulke, Karl Emil Franzos, and Leopold Sacher-Masoch carried on and transformed Kompert’s legacy, shifting the locations of literary ghettos further toward the east as the nineteenth century progressed. In many ways, the image of the shtetl cultivated by prominent Eastern European Yiddish writers such as S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and Y. L. Peretz in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also perpetuated a movement Kompert helped inaugurate.6 In Great Britain, Israel Zangwill’s well-known Children of the Ghetto (1892) drew on similar traditions in its portrayals of Jews in the East End of London, and in France, authors such as Alexandre Weill and Daniel Stauben, Kompert’s French translator, produced portraits of village life in Alsace formally similar to Kompert’s.7

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Of all the exemplars of the genre that Kompert helped launch in 1848, of course, none is better known than Sheldon Bock and Jerry Stein’s Fiddler on the Roof (1964–1972). Reworking material from Sholem Aleichem, Bock and Stein created a Broadway musical that has continued to live on through its 1971 film adaptation and its numerous revivals and productions on stages all over the world. Obviously, Fiddler on the Roof differs from nineteenth-century ghetto fiction in numerous ways, not least of all in its celebration of America as the promised land and the way the specter of the Holocaust figures as its unspoken backdrop.8 Yet in its concern with the conflict between tradition and modernity and its ambition to capture the spirit of a bygone world in nostalgic and sympathetic terms it very much carries on Kompert’s legacy. Certainly, nineteenth-century Kompert aficionados would have found little that was new in Fiddler on the Roof’s scenes of sentimental family life at the Sabbath table, its portraits of a traditional world on the brink of dissolution, or its use of intermarriage as the test case for the limits of Jewish modernization. Rather than approaching Kompert from the perspective of his twentieth-century heirs or exploring the ways the genre continued to evolve after Kompert, the present chapter explores how it was that ghetto fiction came to gain such a central position in German-Jewish cultural life in the nineteenth century. Kompert provides a useful window into the genre as a whole both because of his pioneering role in establishing the ghetto tale as a reputable form of belles lettres and because his fiction left a particularly rich paper trail in the nineteenth-century press. In this sense, studying Kompert provides ample material that we can use to determine what it means that nostalgic tales about the ghetto became the dominant form of German-Jewish literature during this period. From the perspective of Kompert writing in the 1840s, we shall see, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that a book entitled Aus dem Ghetto would ever have such an impact. The term “ghetto” was first used in 1516, in Italian, to refer to the Jewish quarter in Venice, and while it was introduced into German already in the seventeenth century, it was generally used with reference to Italian Jewish life, not to describe German or Bohemian Judengassen or Jewish quarters.9 Technically speaking, few Central European Jews ever lived in ghettos, and what is more, few observers of Jewish life in the early nineteenth century used this

75

76

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

term to refer to Jews’ historic places of residence. In the aftermath of Aus dem Ghetto and further works by Kompert and others, nevertheless, the term ghetto quickly became a widely accepted shorthand for the entirety of premodern Jewish life, and Kompert was commonly hailed, in popular lectures for Jewish audiences, as both a great German writer and as the premier historian of the past century of Jewish life.10 In its terminology, even a pioneering study of Jewish social history such as Jacob Katz’s 1973 book Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 owes more than it acknowledges to a phrase that only gained widespread currency in the aftermath of Kompert’s popular success.11 Like Inquisition fiction, ghetto tales created a usable past, one that underscored the potential of literature to function as an agent and medium of cultural memory. As Richard Cohen has noted in a seminal essay on “Nostalgia and the ‘Return to the Ghetto,’” ghetto tales like those produced by Kompert enabled middle-class Jews in Central and Western Europe to “identify passively with their vanishing past, feel a sense of pride with their recent ancestors, and envision the ghetto as the authentic place of their nostalgia memories.”12 Ghetto fiction quickly came to take on larger-than-life functions for German Jews, becoming for many the definitive representation of the immediate Jewish past per se. In this way, as Cohen notes, ghetto tales performed a function similar to that of the celebrated cycle of portraits idealizing traditional Jewish life by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim that we discussed in the Introduction, the Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben. Oppenheim in fact often cited Kompert as one of his models.13 Obviously, readers of ghetto tales were aware they were reading literature and not ethnography or history proper. Indeed, ghetto fiction functioned so well as a vessel for cultural memory, we shall see, precisely because it claimed to be secular literature of the highest possible order—because it seemed, as literature, to be achieving a level of widespread acceptance that seemed eternally elusive for German-Jewish fiction about the Inquisition. The nostalgia for the world of traditional Judaism that ghetto literature fueled is important, in other words, because it recuperated the lost world of premodern Jewish life as a distinctly modern form of aesthetic experience. From the beginning, reviews of Kompert’s fiction made this dynamic explicit. In 1848, just after Aus dem Ghetto was published, a

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

young law student named Emil Lehmann published a lengthy review in Der Orient, one of the most elite Jewish newspapers of its day, where he celebrated Kompert’s tales as the very best “narratives written by and about Jews” to date.14 Lehmann, a passionate supporter of the revolution of 1848, spent much of his subsequent life fighting for complete emancipation and religious reform. In poetry he published in Der Orient in 1847 and 1848, he frequently called on his contemporaries to render the “ghetto” a thing of the past and fully integrate themselves into German society.15 Later in life, as the president of Dresden’s Jewish community for decades, he proved to be a tireless and radical reformer. Lehmann, in fact, advocated mixed marriages between Jews and Christians, switching the celebration of the Jewish Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday, and ending the practice of circumcision.16 Yet throughout his career, this radical reformer managed to pair his characteristic call for the destruction of ghetto walls with an idealization of traditional Jewish life. In later years, he was a big fan of Oppenheim’s portraits, and he brought this same level of enthusiasm to Kompert in 1848.17 Lehmann was drawn to the way Kompert made traditional Jewish life accessible to the general public, and he praised the authenticity that set these tales apart from all other forms of contemporary literature about Jews and Judaism. When reading Kompert, he wrote, “one feels that the Jews in the ghetto are truly as they are described here, and one feels that the author is a Jew—a Jew whose heart beats warmly for his brothers in the ghetto.”18 Lehmann argued that the great advantage of this sympathy and compassion was that it enabled Kompert to see beyond the filthy and dilapidated externals of ghetto life and traditional Judaism. He praised Aus dem Ghetto for revealing the “wealth of poetry” and “depth of feeling” that lay “hidden behind those rigid, traditional ceremonies” that appear to “kill the spirit and the heart.” Kompert’s great merit, he wrote, is his ability to reveal the great “secret of Judaism” in its traditional form, the secret “that in those narrow, dirty huts, under the raging, screaming, haggling masses, hearts are beating, enthusiastic about everything noble and high, hearts, capable of the greatest sacrifice!”19 For Lehmann, the pleasures of ghetto fiction lay not just in its alleged authenticity but in its ability to transcend the confines of ghetto life and ritual to capture the exemplary morality—and universality—of the Jew-

77

78

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

ish people. In this scenario, literary representations of ghetto life help themselves to dismantle the ghetto walls: Kompert’s ghetto tales serve as an agent of progress, idealizing the past in the service of the present. Focusing less on the content of Kompert’s tales than on the cultural work they perform, he claims the highest possible aesthetic pedigree for these nostalgic fictions of traditional Jewish life. Later in the century, another reviewer in the Jewish press noted that Kompert offered “faithful poetic depictions of Jewish life” that exemplified, in their perfection, Friedrich Schiller’s famous dictum in his celebrated poem, “Die Götter Griechenlands” (The Gods of Greece, 1788), “What is to live immortal in song / Must perish in life.”20 Writing in 1848, Lehmann too put Kompert in Schiller’s company: And one more wish: may the book Aus dem Ghetto prove true the words of the poet [Schiller]: “What is to live immortal in song / Must perish in life.” An able writer has introduced the ghetto to poetry, in a work that should be counted among the best examples of German literature in the modern era. The ghetto now lives in poetry—so may it then perish forever in life. If after many years one of our progeny will read the book Aus dem Ghetto, he will be amazed at an era that imprisoned entire classes of human beings in locked-up dungeons.21

The function of Kompert’s works is not to mourn the passing of the ghetto or allow Jewish readers to reconnect with a lost past. By capturing the ghetto in fiction, Kompert’s tales actively help consign the ghetto to the past, making way for a world in which the ghetto lives on in literature—and in literature alone. Schiller’s “Die Götter Griechenlands” mourned the loss of the grandeur of Greek antiquity but also celebrated the modern world’s ability to memorialize the magnificence of Greece in song, through poetry. In Lehmann’s view, Kompert’s tales enact an analogous aesthetic, although one considerably less tragic: Kompert introduces the Jewish ghetto to the canon of German literature so that it might die out as a historical reality.22 The ghetto “must perish in life,” in other words, so that it might live on as an object of cultural consumption, so that it might assume its proper position of respectability alongside the ancient Greeks who loomed so large over nineteenth-century German culture. Nineteenth-century intellectual elites often decried nostalgia as a widespread social and cultural malaise, issuing harsh indictments of

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

contemporaries who expressed their discomforts over the rapid pace of modernization and urbanization by fixating on a childlike, idealized past.23 In many ways, German Jews were no different. In 1850, Ludwig Philippson dedicated a lead essay in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums to reflecting on the dizzying transformation that the last fifty years had brought about, particularly for Jews. Philippson duly noted that his coreligionists, even those with only the most limited memories of traditional Jewish folkways, were prone to entirely natural feelings of displacement, nostalgia, and melancholy. At the same time, however, he warned his readers to manage their nostalgia properly so that they not fall prey to a “weakened spirit that loses consciousness over the demise of extinct forms of life to such an extent that it laments the current state of the world.” After all, he concluded, calling on his readers to root themselves firmly in the present, the “eternally young spirit of humanity celebrates its supreme triumph in the self-destruction of such extinct forms of life.”24 Driven by anxieties over eruptions of uncontrolled melancholy among his readers, Philippson thus vilified nostalgia, disregarding the ways nostalgia for traditional Jewish folkways could serve a modernizing agenda such as his own. For both Lehmann and the other reviewer quoted above, Kompert was hardly fueling a childlike fixation on the past. Rather, he deserved credit for transforming the immediate Jewish past into secular culture of the highest possible order, for expanding the canon of German literature so that it might contain a place for the representation of the triumphs and tragedies of traditional Jewish life. For Lehmann, indeed, Kompert transformed the ghetto—with its “narrow, dirty huts” and its “raging, screaming, haggling masses”—into an aesthetic phenomenon that represented bourgeois culture par excellence, an art form on par with Schiller’s classicism. It is certainly not unimportant, as commentators have routinely pointed out, that Kompert’s tales are infused with the typical nineteenth-century bourgeois glorification of family life and familial intimacy.25 The universal humanity that Lehmann finds at the heart of Kompert’s fiction manifests itself primarily in familial settings, Sabbath dinners, sentimental homecomings, and tearful reunions between family members. Literature expressing nostalgia for the ghetto in this manner thus actively promoted the promulgation of middle-class mentalities and mores among German Jews,

79

80

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

and it did so at the same time as it claimed these Jews’ own decidedly prebourgeois past as an integral part of their own present-day identity as members of the middle class. The present chapter concerns itself with what we might call, following the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the “cultural capital” of German-Jewish ghetto fiction, that is, the ability of ghetto literature to secure nineteenth-century German Jews a form of cultural respectability that might serve as a marker of their newly found—or yetto-be achieved—middle-class status.26 Some recent scholarship, drawing on the work of cultural anthropologists, has regarded Kompert as a practitioner of cultural memory, a writer who invested his fiction with the task of recording the religious and cultural practices of a community caught up in the process of dissolution.27 Kompert’s tales clearly give their readers glimpses into a lost world, and as we mentioned above, there were contemporaries who hailed Kompert as a great cultural historian. But it is equally important in what framework, to what end, and in what format Kompert’s fictional tales invoke the fading world of the Jewish ghetto. For Lehmann, Kompert is less an ethnographer than a writer deserving of Schiller’s company, and his nostalgia for the ghetto is important as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a viable form of contemporary German culture. Rather than concentrating on ethnographic detail, this chapter thus foregrounds how Kompert’s ghettos negotiated their aesthetic status as literature, how these tales sought—as fictions— to claim bourgeois respectability for the immediate Jewish past. In continuing our analysis, it will be necessary to spend some time considering Kompert’s fiction on its own terms, looking at the self-conscious manner in which it reflects on the workings of nostalgia. The following section thus explores the biographical and historical conditions under which Kompert turned to ghetto fiction and examines, through a sampling of his most prominent tales, how his texts mobilize nostalgia to create new forms of identity for an upwardly mobile, increasingly German-identified Jewish readership. Ultimately, this chapter is concerned more with the cultural work these texts were called on to perform than with the texts themselves. Particularly since, in Lehmann’s eyes, Kompert’s tales were German literature par excellence, and not just literature designed for Jews, it will be necessary to consider the general, non-Jewish responses to Kompert in detail, exploring

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

how the general reception of his ghetto tales in the nineteenth-century press provides a commentary on their ability to function as effective cultural capital. Against this backdrop, we will explore internal Jewish debates about the cultural currency of Kompert’s tales. In this sense, Kompert’s fiction and its reception give us a valuable case study of the privileged role that literature assumed in imagining a usable Jewish past that would be compatible with aspirations toward middle-class respectability in the present. In the end, we shall see, there was more at stake than simply a strategic accumulation of cultural capital. Kompert’s fiction helped launch a type of secular literature that encouraged Jews to develop and cultivate multiple identities—as Germans and as Jews—at the same time as it enabled them to maintain a sense of successful integration into the German bourgeoisie. In this sense, it testifies to the new power and authority that Jewish fiction could wield in GermanJewish culture, helping us zone in on the crucial role that literature played in enabling Jews to imagine themselves as part of a community with other Germans at the same time as it encouraged them to experience their Jewish identity as mediated by secular belles lettres.

The Poetics and Politics of Compassion: Kompert’s Jewish Tragedies Born in 1822 in the Judengasse in Münchengrätz (Mnichovo Hradištˇe), Kompert was part of a generation of Bohemian Jewish intellectuals who took advantage of new possibilities open to Jews in the Austrian Empire and left behind the relatively insular worlds inhabited by their ancestors. Like many of his peers, Kompert attended German-language schools and universities, eventually coming to identify wholeheartedly with both democratic politics and the liberating force of secular culture.28 As an adult, Kompert wrote almost exclusively about Jewish themes and largely about the locales of his childhood, and he did so self-consciously as a German writer. Kompert did not perceive his efforts to mediate between the provincial world of his youth and the reading public as a whole as a unique or unusual challenge. Coming of age in this era, he never discerned a conflict between what he called his “German way of feeling” and his German “way of representing

81

82

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

things,” on the one hand, and his unwavering commitment to his Jewish “material,” “faith,” and “coreligionists.” Rather, he identified his work as part of a broader trend in contemporary literature, a contribution to the sustained interest in regionalism and local color that was such a distinctive feature of German prose fiction in the aftermath of Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten.29 In the tales he told about how he became a poet of the ghetto, Kompert typically emphasized the interplay between German form and Jewish content. Let us consider, for instance, his own account of how he came to write Aus dem Ghetto: I was twenty-four years old, serving as a tutor for Count [Georg] Andrassy in Hoffureth, and was the only Jew for many miles around. More than a year had passed since I had seen a fellow Jew. I no longer know what chance incident brought this fact to my consciousness, but its effect on me was odd: the ghetto appeared far away and lost, as if I were thousands of miles, hundreds of years away from it—and suddenly this sentiment lent it its poetic significance for me, much to my surprise. It still didn’t occur to me to make a work of art out of this material. An anthology of popular fairy tales [Volksmärchen] came into my hands; spurred on by this book, I wrote my “Märchen aus dem Ghetto” [Fairy Tales from the Ghetto], at first with great difficulty, and then truly overcome by memories of childhood. . . . After great hesitation I sent the tales to L[udwig] A[ugust] Frankl, whose Sonntagsblätter had already published numerous essays of mine; he accepted them and demanded more. This surprised me; I had thought that these fairy tales could only interest Jews, and the Sonntagsblätter had a primarily Christian readership. . . . Since I had written all the fairy tales I could, I thought about trying a novella! That will certainly be nothing for a Christian public, I thought! . . . An old story that people told in Pressburg stuck in my head, so I wrote it down, faithfully recording how it had been passed down to me. This was the first novella of the volume, “Judith die Zweite” [Judith the Second]. Soon this was followed by a second story, which also took place in Pressburg, but which I made up, “Alt Babele” [Old Bubbie]. At this point I was done with Pressburg, and I needed some time before hitting on the most obvious thing: to go to my homeland, the Bohemian ghetto. Childhood memories from the ghetto came to me with the figure of the schlemiel; a letter from home gave me the material for “Ohne Be-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

willigung” [Without Authorization]; and a visit home in 1847 gave me the material for “Die Kinder des Randars” [The Randar’s Children].30

This story is important less because it depicts what actually transpired at the estate of Count Andrassy than because it was Kompert’s own favored account of how he became a poet of the ghetto. Quoted here according to the obituary that his friend and fellow ghetto writer Karl Emil Franzos published in the Neue freie Presse, Vienna’s liberal daily newspaper, immediately after Kompert’s death in 1886, this story found its way into many other contemporary accounts.31 As Kompert describes it, the ghetto first gains poetic significance through the occasional eruptions of isolation and loneliness experienced by Jews who have ventured into the world beyond traditional Judaism. Aus dem Ghetto is thus first and foremost a product of alienation, a direct response to Kompert’s own sudden feelings of temporal and geographical estrangement from the Jewish world of his youth. But ghetto fiction is hardly the product of radical dislocation alone. In Kompert’s account, its genesis is heavily mediated: by the literary model supplied by the unnamed anthology of German folk tales; by oral traditions in Pressburg (Bratislava), a city in Slovakia far from the Bohemian ghetto of Kompert’s youth; by Kompert’s conscious and deliberate decision to return home and discover what should have been, but apparently was not, the “most obvious” subject to represent; and by the startling interest of the non-Jewish public in the type of literature that emerges from these multiple encounters. In this context, ghetto fiction performs a type of therapy, giving poetic significance to Jews’ feelings of displacement, compensating them for their losses through a type of German literature that keeps them connected to that which they have willingly left behind. If Kompert launches a form of literature that grants Jews a symbolic reunion with the lost world of their childhood, he does not do so in an insular Jewish sphere. (After writing the first draft of his “Fairy Tales from the Ghetto,” tellingly, he abandoned writing in Yiddish.32) He writes, rather, in the medium of German literature, in a manner that is transparent to a nonJewish public that approaches this literature with the same or an even deeper level of interest than Jews might. If ghetto fiction seeks to help Jews estranged from traditional Jewish life overcome their feelings of

83

84

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

disorientation, this form of therapy works only because its Jewish readers are confident that the non-Jewish public accepts these literary ghettos as a viable cultural form. Producing ghetto literature helps a Jew like Kompert overcome the pain of seeming “thousands of miles” and “hundreds of years” away from his childhood home, that is, only because it connects Kompert and Jews like him to a new home of sorts: a non-Jewish readership ready and eager to consume this novel form of literature. In his famous preface to the Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, Auerbach emphasized the national relevance of regional literature, arguing that literary depictions of provincial life would help serve the political project of German nation-building. In this context, Auerbach compared his fiction to “modest waves” flowing from the river in his hometown Nordstetten, the Neckar, into that “great German river” and “artery of Germany,” the “powerful Rhine.”33 Influenced by Auerbach, Kompert’s tales enact a somewhat different dynamic, and not simply because they were written in and—at least initially—for the Austrian Empire. Kompert seeks to build bridges not between provincial life and a future German political state but between traditional Judaism and German culture in the most far-reaching sense of the term. This act of mediation hinges not just on the representation of traditional Jewish life in German literature but on an unexpected act of reciprocity whereby readers of this fiction recognize both the value of ghetto literature as literature as well as its particular poetic significance for Jews. Auerbach, to put the matter crudely, writes for the general German public, not primarily or even secondarily for the Black Forest peasants whom he depicts. Kompert, however, writes for both Jews and the general public, and for his project to be successful, it is crucial that non-Jews recognize both the therapeutic function of this literature for its Jewish readers and its literary value. To what extent the general public actually fulfilled these expectations is an issue to be explored in the next section. For now, we need to consider how Kompert’s tales used strategic portrayals of encounters between the ghetto and the world outside to encourage this type of sympathetic reading. In his obituary in the Neue freie Presse, Franzos characterized Kompert as a thoroughly “sentimental” poet in Schiller’s sense of the term, that is, a writer who paired detailed and realistic de-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

pictions of ghetto life with intellectual reflection and distance, a writer who offered up a self-conscious rather than “naïve” form of nostalgia for the ghetto.34 Given Kompert’s ambitions, it should hardly come as a surprise that his tales often reflected explicitly on the difficulties of leaving behind the ghetto and entering into the world of German culture. Two of his most celebrated tales—“Die Kinder des Randars,” mentioned above, from Aus dem Ghetto, and “Der Dorfgeher” (The Peddler) from his 1851 sequel volume Böhmische Juden—will serve as examples. Both of these texts explore the workings of nostalgia through tales about young men alienated from the ghetto who reflect back on and seek to come to terms with the worlds of their childhood. “Randar,” as Kompert explains, is a term from “the jargon of the ghetto” for “Arendator,” designating the “leaseholder of a village pub or spirits distillery.”35 “Die Kinder des Randars” portrays the trials and tribulations of such an innkeeper, Rebb Schmul, his wife Rachel, and their two children, Moschele and Hannele, who all live thirty minutes outside the Jungbunzlau ghetto, where they serve up spirits to the local Czech peasantry. The plot follows Moschele, who at the beginning of the text finds himself much enamored of Mendel Wilna, a Polish beggar and frequent visitor to Rebb Schmul’s inn who dreams about rebuilding Jerusalem. Mendel resurfaces at various junctures throughout the tale, but Moschele, like the rest of the characters, ultimately rejects his dreams without discrediting his piety or the seriousness of his longing for a homeland. Encouraged by his mother, Moschele decides to leave home to pursue a secular education, and while in school he boards in the ghetto in Jungbunzlau with a traditionally minded used clothes dealer named Salme Floh. While studying at the German Gymnasium he gives up his Yiddish name Moschele and adopts the German name Moritz, and he also encounters Czech classmates with a “deep resentment against everything ‘German’” who complain about the Habsburg Germanization policies so apparent in the structure of their school.36 Moritz himself flirts with Bohemian nationalism before concluding that it holds no place for him as a Jew, and at one point, pressured by his and his sister’s Czech friend Honza, he even samples non-kosher food at a peasant wedding. As a Jew, Moritz suffers discrimination at school, and his family too suffers the occasional vengeance of the local peasantry at home. Indeed, when Honza’s father, angry over his unpaid tab

85

86

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

at Rebb Schmul’s inn, sets his barn on fire, this sets off a chain of events that leads to the death of Moschele and Hannele’s beloved mother. Throughout the text, Moritz returns home at frequent intervals, and at each of these junctures he reflects on ghetto and village life, on Czech-Jewish relations, on similarities between Jews’ and Bohemians’ lack of a homeland, on the wonders of the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot, and on other topics. In the final pages of the tale, after his mother has died, his sister is driven by an erotic attachment to her only friend Honza—meanwhile a priest—to contemplate conversion to Christianity. Moritz enters at the eleventh hour to prevent her apostasy, ultimately convincing his sister to return to the fold by reminding her that as a Christian she would never be reunited with her parents after death. The Randar dies soon thereafter, and the tale concludes on an elliptical note: “Moritz is now a physician in a silent ghetto of Bohemia. He cures sick bodies and souls. His sister is living proof of this. She will remain unmarried. Can she who has wandered on ‘foreign paths’ ever forget who was once the companion of her youth?”37 This tale clearly charts a path away from tradition, but Kompert hardly produces a narrative that unequivocally celebrates the universal salvation of German culture. Moritz, to point out the obvious, does not follow in Kompert’s footsteps and relocate to Vienna or even a provincial Austrian capital where he might be a part of a Jewish world immersed in German culture. After completing his studies in Prague, he moves to an unnamed ghetto and lives out his life there, apparently unmarried and without progeny, serving as a physician to his fellow Jews. And although the text indicates that Hannele serves as living proof of his ability to heal bodies and souls, she, like her brother, hardly lives happily ever after. The text clearly applauds the thwarting of the conversion attempt that is its denouement, but this is hardly a narrative celebrating the vibrancy of Jewish continuity. “Die Kinder des Randars” reveals instead the vulnerability, potential barrenness, and the melancholy of Jewish life, the tragedies that can ensue from encounters between traditional Judaism and the world beyond. At the end of “Die Kinder des Randars,” Jewish life seems more fragile than it did at the beginning of the text, and while German education and secular knowledge enable Moritz to transcend the limits of the world of his youth, reflect on it, and return to play a productive role in this world, the text

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

as a whole never even attempts to provide a satisfactory answer to the question posed by the Polish beggar: “Where is the Jew’s Fatherland?”38 The volume may be entitled Aus dem Ghetto, but the Jews it portrays remain trapped in the world it creates. This literature may be written in German and marked by a “German way of feeling” and “representing things.” The text’s protagonists, however, never find a home for themselves in German culture. Unlike the waves from Auerbach’s Nordstetten that flow into the Rhine and become a national phenomenon, Moschele and Hannele remained trapped in a Bohemian ghetto, and a silent one at that. Kompert’s contemporaries typically praised him for both the “authenticity” with which he portrayed Jewish life and his poetic “idealization” or “transfiguration” (Verklärung) of the ghetto, marking him in this way as an exemplar of the literary movement that has come to be known as poetic realism. In the case of the tale we have just discussed, transfiguration hardly means a sugar-coated idealization of ghetto life. In introducing the ghetto into German literature, Kompert casts it as a site of tragedy. Lehmann clearly picked up on this in his 1848 review of Aus dem Ghetto in Der Orient, claiming that “the tragic element” was “the dominant element” of the entire volume: “It is through the portrayal of this tragedy that the author announces the depth of his conceptions and the faithfulness to nature of his representations. For where has the tragic penetrated more deeply, as it were, into everyday life than in the ghetto?”39 And as Lehmann noted, tragedy was not unique to this particular tale. It figures just as prominently in the other major Kompert narrative to be discussed here, “Der Dorfgeher.” Oppenheim’s famous painting Der Dorfgeher (Figure 4) may have been inspired by Kompert’s tale. The ethos of Kompert’s “Der Dorfgeher,” however, differs considerably from the static depiction of harmony in Oppenheim’s image. Kompert’s tale is less about the peddler who is its title figure than his long-lost son Elije, who has not been seen in his native Bohemian ghetto since he turned thirteen and ran off to Vienna. Elije, now a university student known as Emanuel, is about to marry a young Christian woman but wants to return home and pay his family one last visit before tying the knot. He makes these plans as an “actor,” a “comedian, in the most jovial mood,” who wants to see if he can manage to visit his

87

88

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Figure 4. Nineteenth-century postcard reproduction of Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Der Dorfgeher, 1873. Image courtesy of the Collection Jewish Historical Museum Amsterdam. Inspired by Kompert’s tale “Der Dorfgeher,” this image was included in the Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben. In his commentary on this image in this volume, Leopold Stein noted that in the days before good roads and railways, Jewish peddlers were crucial middlemen who generally got along very well with the rural population.

family without being recognized.40 Pretending to be a Jewish beggar, he spends a Sabbath dinner with his parents, his forlorn sister, and a new and much younger brother, Benjamin, who reminds him of himself as a youth. Unrecognized by his parents, who repeatedly mourn the loss of their beloved Elije, Emanuel finds himself unable to tear himself

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

away from his family. As he writes in the letters to his fiancée that are interspersed throughout the text, he cannot control the bonds that tie him to family and home, and he ends up spending a week accompanying his father on the road. During this period, his eyes are opened up to the humanity and the worldly sophistication of his peddler-father, whom he comes to recognize as a productive middleman and benefactor to the Czech peasants whom he serves. Ultimately feeling that his fate has been decided, he reveals himself to his parents and siblings, who are overjoyed, and the text ends with a “happily ever after scene” reminiscent of a fairy tale: “Und es war Alles, Alles gut.”41 As Florian Krobb and W. G. Sebald have noted, Elije/Emanuel serves to represent the narrative strategies Kompert himself pursued as a poet of the ghetto.42 In this context, it is telling that this fairy tale ending does not and ultimately cannot provide closure for the tale. Immediately after stating that everyone lived happily ever after, the narrator includes a fragment of a final letter that Emanuel wrote to his fiancée Clara: “(Written on Sunday.) The unhappy one builds his hut close to the residence of happiness. He strolls amid the happy and his smile often has the appearance as if it were lent from them. I will smile, I will be happy—can I ever forget you, though, Clara?”43 In earlier scenes, Emanuel was only all too ready to break the traditional ban on writing on the Jewish Sabbath, and it is important that this letter is written on Sunday. But his external observance of Jewish law—like his reunification with his family—only tells half the story. The text celebrates Elije/ Emanuel’s homecoming, his decision to remain faithful to his parents and his religion, and the promise he recognizes in his younger brother. Yet as in “Die Kinder des Randars” the return to the ghetto is a doubleedged conclusion, one that emphasizes losses and the pains of dislocation, one that is infused with melancholy and tragedy—and one that the happily-ever-after expectations raised by fairy tales cannot contain. Clearly “Der Dorfgeher” is a nostalgic fiction, but the self-consciousness with which it reflects on homecoming hardly draws its readers back to the ghetto world that Kompert’s peers felt he portrayed so authentically. Kompert takes his readers here, rather, into a self-consciously literary ghetto, one with suffering heroes crying out for a type of sympathy and compassion that eludes them in their native home. One of the earliest books that Kompert devoured as a child was Samuel Richardson’s

89

90

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

novel Clarissa (1748),44 and “Der Dorfgeher” borrows heavily from the conventions of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction, particular in its use of letters. In this context it is telling that the text ends with a desperate letter to Clara, a non-Jew, hoping for her understanding of Emanuel’s difficult but necessary decision to remain faithful to his people. In this way, Kompert ensures that the tragedy of “Der Dorfgeher,” like that of “Die Kinder des Randars,” will be read as a drama explicitly performed for its non-Jewish readers, whom the text initiates into the literary world of the ghetto so that they might recognize the noble tragedies that reside there. Kompert wants the ghetto to be memorialized not as an idyllic home but as a tragic space full of literary merit, a site for a Jewish tragedy ready to be transformed into secular literature. In these texts and many others, Kompert hardly offers the simplistic celebration of Jewish continuity and bourgeois family values we encountered in German-Jewish historical fiction. By expanding Auerbach’s model of popular literature to embrace the tragedies of Jewish life in this manner, Kompert does not return to the ghetto of his youth. Rather, he seeks to create a new home for Jews like himself, a literary community where Jews and non-Jews might come together as members of a German reading public consumed with sentimental compassion for Jewish suffering.

Kompert and the Ambivalences of German Liberalism It is impossible, of course, to know in any sort of comprehensive manner how non-Jews encountered this material in the nineteenth century. Kompert, to be sure, did publish some of his texts in journals with an exclusively Jewish readership. An early version of “Alt Babele,” for instance, appeared in Isidor Busch’s Kalendar und Jahrbuch für Israeliten auf das Jahr 5607 in 1846, and in 1848 Ludwig Philippson serialized “Ohne Bewilligung” in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.45 And Gerschel, the Berlin publishing house that prepared a multivolume edition of Kompert’s complete works during the author’s lifetime, in 1882, was known as a publisher of Jewish-themed works, including Abraham Geiger’s prayer book and Philippson’s and Leopold Zunz’s biblical translations. Persistent financial troubles prevented Gerschel’s 1882 edition from becoming the success it might have been, neverthe-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

less, and it is telling here, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, that the authoritative ten-volume edition of Kompert’s works that came out in 1910 was produced by a mainstream publishing house known for its successful editions of the classics, Romantics, and major nineteenthcentury writers.46 Judging by where they were published, Kompert’s tales managed to reach the general readership whose sympathies he wanted to secure. On this level, there is a case to be made that Kompert helped launch an aestheticized vision of Jewish traditional life with claims to solid, middle-class respectability. But publication history alone hardly gives us a sense of how Kompert’s representations of ghetto life managed to achieve widespread cultural currency or what the limits of Kompert’s popularity among non-Jews might have been. It is no coincidence that the peak of Kompert’s popularity overlaps with the heyday of German liberalism from the 1840s to the 1870s. Indeed, as Brian Vick has argued, while anti-Jewish prejudice was not completely foreign to the generation that identified with the ideals of the 1848 revolution, the political and cultural elite of this era typically rejected the explicit anti-Jewish rhetoric of earlier German liberals to espouse a consistent, rights-based position on Jewish emancipation as part of more general constitutional reforms.47 Lingering ambivalence about Jews may have endured among some liberals, that is, but it ceased to get in the way of a principled defense of equal political rights for Jews. A survey of some of the most prominent responses to Kompert in the non-Jewish press will enable us to get a better sense of the workings of Kompert’s aesthetics of sympathy and assess the persistence of such ambivalence among nonJews. In some contexts, we shall see, non-Jewish readers wholeheartedly embraced Kompert’s project in a manner perfectly consonant with both his own goals and the enthusiasm that Lehmann and other Jewish readers brought to his work. In other scenarios, however, his fiction encountered a more resistant public. Before exploring the difficulties that Kompert posed for some of his readers, it is important to consider the extent to which he succeeded in promoting his vision of the noble and tragic life of the ghetto to the general public. The New York-based magazine The Nation wrote toward the end of the century that Kompert’s “Ghetto stories have a merit and interest quite unusual. They are not only of the Ghetto, but

91

92

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

from within, a point of view not often taken in current fiction. They direct attention, at once sympathetically and candidly, to everyday life in the Jewish quarter of an old Bohemian town. As must happen when so treated, the subject yields a return of profound significance.”48 By the time this review was published, in 1896, celebrating the sympathy, authenticity, and accessibility of Kompert was part of an established tradition in the international response to his fiction. In an 1882 essay on “Kompert’s Jewish Tales” in the Fortnightly Review, a journal founded by Anthony Trollope, the British journalist and music critic H. Sutherland Edwards similarly hailed Kompert as a messenger of tolerance whose great art was able to open up the ghetto and its inhabitants to the sympathy of the non-Jewish world. Writing self-consciously against the backdrop of both the antisemitism of Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” and renewed persecution of Jews in the Russian Empire, Edwards presented Kompert as a “keen observer and perfect artist” whose work “awaken[ed] sympathy for them [Jews] among the Christian inhabitants of the Austrian Empire and among Germans generally.”49 The literary historian George Saintsbury, writing in the same year, made a practically identical argument, celebrating Kompert’s “great reputation,” which, he argued, had only increased given the rise in both persecution of Jews in Russia and Central Europe and anti-Jewish prejudice more generally.50 During the mid-nineteenth century, reviews in the German and Austrian press often served up an analogous celebration of the community of tolerance and acceptance created by Kompert’s ghetto tales and their portrayals of Jewish suffering. An essay published in 1861 in the prominent literary review, the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, praised Kompert for his ability to “penetrate into circles and be read by social classes to whom Jewish customs and tradition are completely foreign and who thus naturally lack sympathy.” “The sympathies that [Kompert’s] books have acquired for themselves,” the review continued, “are thus entirely the merit of the poet,” and what makes Kompert so exemplary is that is he neither a “copyist” tied up in empirical details nor a “superficial idealist.” In his fiction, rather, he manages to capture the “living truth” of the Jewish “folk soul” as only a “genuine poet could.”51 An article published in 1855 in the same journal took a similar position, praising Kompert for “showing the surprised and ashamed

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Christian world: look, this is how the Jews love, believe, pray and are blessed where you believe to have the right to hate and persecute them.” Kompert’s merit, here again, is to have unveiled the “deep poetry that lies in orthodox Judaism,” to have shown his non-Jewish audience the “mercy and loyalty of pious love” at the root of traditional Jewish life.52 An 1855 article in the Viennese political newspaper Die Donau similarly lauded Kompert for his authentic and sympathetic portrayal of a “piece of [Jewish] national life,” the striving of Jews to find a homeland.53 The Austrian lexicographer Constant von Wurzbach celebrated Kompert in 1864 as “one of the few prose writers of young Austria who has acquired a broad reputation among the German reading public.”54 Like Lehmann, many non-Jewish reviewers welcomed Kompert’s project to use literature to gain sympathy for Jewish suffering as an explicitly political undertaking. For many critics, his works became synonymous with the year 1848, even if the events of the March revolution tended to delay the attention that enthusiastic reviewers felt Kompert deserved.55 In September 1848, in one of the earliest reviews of Aus dem Ghetto, the liberal journalist Ferdinand Kürnberger heralded Kompert as a revolutionary writer whose literary representations of Jews effectively tore down ghetto walls: “Kompert unlocks the sad gates of the ghettos and shows us, in the mirror of poetry, . . . just as dignified a people behind the iron gates as in front of them.” With his “five simple tales,” Kürnberger wrote, Kompert unequivocally solves the question of whether Jews should be given equal rights. By unlocking the gates of the ghetto to give non-Jews a glimpse of traditional Jewish life, Kompert thus contributes to the dismantling of ghetto walls. For Kürnberger, writing in 1848, the community consumed with sympathy for Jewish suffering that Kompert sought to produce was on the brink of becoming a political reality, and Kompert figured for him as a democratic author with a “prophetic vision.”56 Complete emancipation did not ensue in Austria in 1848, and Kürnberger’s involvement with the failed revolution led him to flee Vienna a month after publishing this review. His vision of ghetto fiction helping dismantle the ghetto, however, outlived this particular historical moment. Later in the century, the Austrian poet Betty Paoli also celebrated Kompert’s poetics of sympathy and his use of literature to forge links between Jews and non-Jews. Kompert, Paoli wrote in an enthusiastic 1875

93

94

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

review article in the Ausburger Allgemeine Zeitung, was a “true artist” who “introduced his readers to the foreignness of customs, conditions and opinions.” She praised his ability to “bring us [non-Jews] closer to an appreciation of the particularities of ghetto life” and “produce a feeling of belonging together with those who used to be the object of ridicule and scorn. . . . This was the task that Kompert took on with his first book and that he has pursued almost exclusively ever since, with a dedication that derives from the deepest sympathy.” Emphasizing, like so many others, the importance of the year 1848 for Kompert’s emergence as a writer, Paoli paired his successes with the political progress Jews had seen since the 1840s. “Kompert is too much a poet to want to have impact in any other way than through artistic means. In his case, however, the simple, faithful representation of reality produced by itself an indictment of the intolerance of laws concerning Jews and a plea for the oppressed.”57 For many of these readers, Kompert helped launch a community deeply interested in literary articulations of Jewish foreignness, a community of readers willing and eager to welcome his vision of the Jewish past into the pantheon of modern German literature. Paoli, Kürnberger, and others celebrated Kompert’s tales self-consciously as part of a secular community of readers who actively welcomed Jewish emancipation, and in this sense, Lehmann’s hopes that Kompert’s fiction would promote acculturation and establish a sense of cultural respectability for the Jewish past do not seem entirely misplaced. Indeed, many Jewish onlookers paid particular attention to such symptoms of acceptance by mainstream literary culture. Perhaps no review aroused more attention in this context than the almost thirty-page homage to Kompert that the distinguished French literary critic Saint-René Taillandier published in 1852 in the Revue des deux mondes, one of nineteenth-century Europe’s leading literary reviews.58 Reviewing Aus dem Ghetto and Böhmische Juden, Taillandier celebrated Kompert’s authenticity and poetic vision, presenting his work as an example of the best of recent German literature with its “democratic poetry” and concern with local color. Taillandier is important here not just because he shares the enthusiasm that many other liberal readers brought to Kompert. He also illuminates the limits of such appreciation. He argues, namely, that Kompert’s tales raise the expectation of radical change, invoking a pos-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

sible world in which Christian society will triumph over Jewish mores and where Christianity will emerge victorious over Judaism—even if Jews themselves never actually come around to recognizing the divinity of Jesus. Kompert’s explicit goals, Taillandier conceded, were not to “write the prophetic history of the last descendants of Abraham” and “announce the approaching ruin of the synagogue” but simply to “write for us the particular memories of the Jewish world.” But in doing so, his work raises questions, Taillandier concludes, and in portraying the “hidden poetry of Jewish mores,” Kompert ends up awakening a “natural Christianity,” a world in which Judaism must perish or be radically reformed.59 In this case, Kompert’s fiction clearly did not launch a secular community consumed with compassion for Jewish suffering. For a reader like Taillandier, Kompert’s ghetto tales could also help maintain a distinctly Christian public full of ambivalence about the foreign nature of Jews and Judaism, a public for whom the noble Jews Kompert created in his tragic ghettos were always potential Christians. Needless to say, with its much more celebratory stance toward the Jewish past and present, the historical fiction we explored in the preceding chapter hardly opened itself up to such interpretations. On one level, to be sure, a reading like Taillandier’s was not entirely unprompted, even given the clear stance against conversion expressed in tales like “Der Dorfgeher” and “Die Kinder des Randars.” As part of his vision of liberal tolerance, Kompert often created worlds in which Jews developing increased understanding of and appreciation for Christianity. In “Eine Verlorene” (A Lost Child), the tale that immediately followed “Der Dorfgeher” in Böhmische Juden, for instance, Kompert tells the story of a gradual rapprochement between a ghetto Jew named Jossef Leben and his sister Dinah, who years earlier married a local Czech peasant, converted to Catholicism, and changed her name to Madlena.60 At the beginning of the tale, neither Jossef nor his mother, Marjim, has so much as spoken to Dinah/Madlena for years, and they have had nothing to do with her, her husband, or her Catholic children. Madlena has grown so alienated from her Jewish roots, in fact, that when she finally does begin speaking to her brother, he is struck that she speaks Yiddish like a non-Jew. In this tale, moreover, intolerance reigns on both sides; the Leben family’s suspicions of Christianity are matched, if not surpassed,

95

96

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

by the harsh anti-Jewish tirades of the new priest in town. Eventually, however, brother and sister come to terms with each other, and at the conclusion of the tale, Marjim, on her deathbed, meets and pronounces Jewish blessings on her grandchildren, even extending this honor to Madlena’s unborn child. After Marjim has died peacefully, Jossef gives up peddling and—in keeping with the dreams of a “regenerated” Jewry inherited from Enlightenment ideologues such as Christian Wilhelm Dohm—he becomes a farmer, cultivating fields next to those of his sister and brother-in-law.61 Part of what enables this rapprochement is Jossef ’s growing understanding that his sister married for love and that she embraced Catholicism only for her children’s sake, as part of her effort to be a good mother. Another key element—and this is equally important in the structure of the tale—is the Leben family treasure, the secret writings of the family patriarch, the great-grandfather, the “Urdede” or “Urzeyde.” Much to Jossef ’s surprise, these turn out to be Hebrew translations of the Sermon on the Mount. Despite the rapprochement it stages between Jews and Christians, however, “Eine Verlorene” never advocates conversion or announces the “approaching ruin of the synagogue.” It treats the relationship between Jossef and Dinah/Madlena, rather, entirely as a family matter, one symptomatic of a need for greater mutual tolerance between Jews and Christians. Both Jossef and his sister’s family till their own, separate fields at the end of the text. Jossef may adopt a new appreciation for the Sermon of the Mount, but he does so as a Jew, just as Madlena’s children receive Jewish blessings from their grandmother as Christians. For Taillandier writing in Revue des deux mondes, nevertheless, this call for mutual respect could be read as a sign of the triumph of Christian society over Jewish mores, and he was not the only reader to subsume Kompert’s Jewish tragedies into a master-narrative of Christian redemption. In 1881, Helen Zimmern, the famed British Nietzsche translator, made a similar argument in Appleton’s Journal, a prominent New York–based literary and political magazine. Like Taillandier and others, Zimmern hailed Kompert as an effective interpreter of Judaism to the non-Jewish world and deplored the “deeply disgraceful German persecution of the Jews” that has “drawn the attention of Europe anew to this wonderful people.” Noting how “the too universal eighteenth-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

century cosmopolitanism” has unfortunately yielded the “inevitable reaction” of a “great revival of race-feeling,” she finds in Kompert’s oeuvre an antidote to these developments, a representation of the essential humanity of Jews “present[ing] such a sharp contrast to the mistaken ideas conceived of them by outsiders and fostered by the ignorant delineation of novelists.” Kompert, for Zimmern, is a “poet of the Ghetto” who speaks to both Jews and Gentiles and who effectively captures the “melancholy atmosphere that hangs over the Ghetto and its inmates, and is reproduced in their lives.” At the same time, however, this “poet of the past” is a “prophet of the time to come” who delivers the “social gospel of modern Israel.” And what is this gospel? Kompert, she claims, ultimately seeks to “introduce the gentler doctrines of Jesus, and to make his coreligionists see in the New Testament that which it truly is, a continuation and completion of the ancient Law.” The great merit of his tales, she concludes, is that they effectively characterize “an old civilization that is fast disappearing before the light of a large, grander day.”62 For well-intentioned readers like Zimmern or Taillandier, Kompert’s sympathetic representations of ghetto Jews became part of a program of Christian compassion, one that significantly undermined the therapeutic function Kompert hoped this fiction would perform for Jews as they acculturated and moved into the ranks of the middle class. Rather than accepting Kompert’s conception of the ghetto as a tragic space that present-day Jews could claim with pride as their own past, such readers recast Kompert’s ghettos as ancestral relics ripe for maturation into the “large, grander day” of Christian civilization. In this scenario, ghetto fiction appeals to non-Jewish audiences because it seems to forge a bridge from the Jewish past to the Christian present, rendering the dismantling of the ghetto walls synonymous with the end of Judaism and the advent of Christianity. Kompert himself, to underscore the point made earlier, sought to prevent such appropriations of his work and proactively discredited such Christian fantasies about Jews and Judaism. In “Der Dorfgeher,” for instance, when Elije first returns to the Bohemian ghetto, he writes a letter to his Christian fiancée Clara that ruminates on how Jesus emerged from a ghetto like that of his hometown. The rest of the narrative, however, subsequently seeks to eradicate such Christian fantasies about Jews and Jesus. Elije breaks off his engagement and

97

98

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

asks Clara to accept his decision to remain among his people and recognize the “poetry” of the Jewish ghetto on its own terms.63 Like many of Kompert’s tales, “Der Dorfgeher” ends on a melancholy note, but for Kompert this is a specifically Jewish form of melancholy, one irreconcilable with any insistence on Christianity’s triumph over Judaism and Jewish folkways. Kompert’s ghettos are clearly permeated with middleclass virtues, but the Jewish tragedies they enact seek to resist Christian redemption, holding out hopes for a secular world in which Jews might be accepted as Jews. For some Christian-oriented readers—even highly secular ones like Zimmern or Taillandier—Kompert’s tales called out to be subsumed into master-narratives of Christianity’s supersession of Judaism. For such thinkers, the welcoming of Jewish difference central to Kürnberger’s, Paoli’s, or Lehmann’s political liberalism never came into question. And other readers found Kompert’s representations of ghetto life difficult to reconcile with any form of universalism, be it Christian or secular. Several weeks after Kompert’s death in November 1886, the best-selling liberal family journal Die Gartenlaube published an obituary that reveals some of the difficulties Kompert faced in securing the sympathies of a non-Jewish public. As Henry Wasserman has argued, particularly during the heyday of its inaugural editor Ernst Keil, the Gartenlaube promoted a sentimental and sympathetic vision of Judaism as a harbinger of Gemütlichkeit and family values, creating what Wasserman terms a “kitsch Jew,” a noble Jew enriched through sentimentality, a bourgeois work ethic, and the emotional richness of family life.64 Not surprisingly, Oppenheim’s images found a positive reception in the Gartenlaube, and in the period before Keil’s death in 1878, the journal typically communicated to its readers—375,000 subscribers in the year of Keil’s death—a vision of Jews as victims of prejudice and persecution and thus as “kindred spirits for German liberal Bürger” fighting against the power of more privileged classes.65 The obituary for Kompert marks a clear departure from this type of philosemitism. To be sure, the article expresses sympathy for the misfortunes of Jews, whom it casts as the victims of dated, medieval prejudice, and it mourns Kompert as an accomplished artist. At the same time, however, it stresses the limited scope of his fiction: “Leopold Kompert is a fine painter of the soul. Experienced connoisseurs and crit-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

ics of taste know how to appreciate this, but his cultural sketches will not be able to win over the great public, apart from his coreligionists.” Kompert, that is, does a fine job of portraying the “strange” world of the ghetto with its “mummified customs.” These vivid portrayals of the foreign and decaying world of the Jewish ghetto, however, are of limited interest to anyone but Jews or specialized literary critics. Kompert may have seen it as his task to portray the “battle in the soul of his heroes and heroines between devotion to tradition and the law of the fathers, on the one hand, and dedication to the modern era that is knocking on the gates of the old ghetto and at the hearts of its inhabitants on the other.”66 His depictions of the Jewish struggle between tradition and modernity, however, clearly fail to appeal to the general public. The fact that this obituary appeared in the Christmas issue of the Gartenlaube—an issue filled with special Christmas poems and illustrations—only served further to underscore the foreignness of Kompert’s work. Indeed, the comments quoted above were preceded by a section “For the Christmas Table” recommending special books for the holiday season. And immediately following the obituary stressing Kompert’s limited appeal to non-Jews, the editors presented a color image—the only one in this issue—that offered a reproduction of Ludwig BlumeSiebert’s painting Nach der Bescherung (After Giving Christmas Gifts), printed with the subtitle “Christmas Greetings of the Gartenlaube to Its Readers.” In this image, a mother with two young children in the snow walks through a village filled with classically German half-timber houses, holding a Christmas tree branch decorated with ornaments. The Gartenlaube thus offered up Christmas greetings to its 375,000 subscribers at the same time as it stressed the limited appeal of Kompert’s Jewish fiction, which was, despite its author’s best intentions, simply too immersed in the provincial and foreign world of Kompert’s youth to be of any widespread interest to the general public—clearly not recommended reading for the Christmas table. Kompert’s goal may have been to secure the sympathies of the non-Jewish public for his aestheticized vision of the Jewish past and create a community of Jewish and non-Jewish readers equally consumed with compassion for Jewish suffering. The fact that a liberal journal as prominent and widely circulated as the Gartenlaube pronounced Kompert’s fiction to be of limited, Jewish sectarian interest, however, raises questions about the cultural

99

100

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

capital that readers like Lehmann could expect this sort of literature to secure for them. Clearly, many reviewers wholeheartedly welcomed Kompert’s tales and celebrated the literary community of compassion with Jewish suffering they sought to launch. But others, whether with a nominally Christian or a more secular perspective, did not. The contested nature of these responses to Kompert, moreover, was not just an unexpected byproduct of non-Jews’ experiences reading ghetto fiction. As we shall see in the next section, it also represented, from the beginning, a particular challenge for Kompert’s Jewish readers.

Kompert’s Jewish Readers: Toward a Cultural History of the Ghetto Jewish readers who welcomed Kompert’s ghetto tales as an exemplary form of modern German literature did so, importantly, against the backdrop of many others who did not. A radical reformer of Lehmann’s ilk may have celebrated Kompert’s fiction as an instrument of acculturation and liberalization. Prominent voices less sympathetic to the liberal wing of German Jewry, however, often issued wholesale indictments of Kompert’s work. In 1858, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s Jeschurun, the main journal of German-Jewish orthodoxy at the time, charged Kompert with “presenting the world an image of the Jew in which not even a single trait is drawn from reality.” Hirsch’s son Isaak wrote that Kompert, who no longer lived according to Jewish law, had lost the “correct view, the proper appreciation of Jewish doctrines and customs, of Jewish spirit and the Jewish way of thought” that would have enabled him to present an authentic “portrait of the Jew.”67 As early as 1846, Rabbi Zacharias Frankel, the chief representative of the positivehistorical school of German Judaism, a forerunner of the modern conservative movement, similarly charged Kompert with being alienated from existing Judaism.68 Frankel characterized Kompert’s work as artificial, distanced, and condescending toward the Jews he depicted. Hirsch and Frankel hardly belonged to the same ideological camp, but when it came to the question of whether Kompert’s aesthetic idealizations of ghetto life were appropriate reading material for German Jews, they were of one mind: Kompert’s tales lacked authentic Jewish content.69

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Kompert did not enjoy unanimous support among liberal reformers closer to Lehmann in spirit either. These writers rarely complained about Kompert’s lack of authenticity. They were troubled, instead, by ghetto fiction’s lack of universality, and their critiques were marked by the same concern with the provincial and insular nature of Kompert’s work that we saw in the Gartenlaube. In 1846, Rabbi Abraham Geiger, the towering figure in the reform movement, denounced Kompert’s fiction for unnecessarily and romantically foregrounding conflicts between Jewish tradition and the modern world. For Geiger, Kompert simply paid too much attention to the foreignness of traditional Jewish life, and this fixation on Jewish folkways helped fuel a dangerous and “sickly longing” for the past, a “weakly lamenting . . . that sends a broken eye toward a colorful past” rather than encouraging Jews to work for progress (and reform) in the present. Warning his readers not “to look nostalgically at a past shrouded in the charms of poetry,” he encouraged them to avoid reading Kompert and other “Jewish” fiction bent on perpetuating Judaism’s isolation from the non-Jewish world.70 For Geiger, Kompert’s fiction was simply too Jewish to be of interest to the general public, and for this reason, it failed to provide proper reading material for Jews eager to stress their allegiance, as Jews, to the universalism of Western culture. Ludwig Philippson promoted over the course of his distinguished career a similar distaste for the provincial nature of Kompert’s literary project.71 After an initial encouraging review in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums where he celebrated Kompert’s authenticity and encouraged him in his efforts to produce popular fiction gripped by the “heart of the people,”72 Philippson typically paired praise for Kompert’s authenticity and poetic talent with criticism of the inability of such fiction to appeal to anyone but Jews. In his enthusiastic 1848 review of Aus dem Ghetto, for instance, he placed Kompert in Auerbach’s company and celebrated his tales as a “treasure of our [German-Jewish] literature.” At the same time, however, he announced that “Kompert with his ghetto stories will have to bear the burden of everything Jewish and be content with a small readership. The large public will not be able to understand them.”73 Kompert’s work, Philippson emphasizes, certainly gives Jews a poetic representation of themselves, even if, he concedes, there are significant differences between German Jewry’s past and Kompert’s Bohemian ghettos. Ultimately, however,

101

102

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

such ghetto fiction is an aesthetic affair for Jews and Jews alone. In later years, once Kompert increased in popularity among Jews and non-Jews alike, Philippson sharpened his diatribes against ghetto fiction. At one point he even publicly called on Kompert to abandon ghetto tales entirely and try his hand at the genre of the heroic-historical novel promoted by the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums.74 In 1882, after practically ignoring Kompert for years and calling for an end to the production of ghetto literature,75 the paper published a review of Kompert’s complete works that made explicit just how inferior ghetto fiction was. Jewish historical novels, Philippson explained, have unveiled the ethical grandeur of the Jewish past. Ghetto fiction, in contrast, has done nothing but fixate on the “last period of Jewish history before the contact with modern culture transformed Judaism and Jewish life,” and it has done so without any true distance or historical self-consciousness.76 Polemics and possible jealously aside—whatever its popularity among Jewish readers, we remember, the German-Jewish historical fiction that Philippson wrote and promoted through his paper rarely appealed to non-Jews—this critique is important because it resonates strikingly with the standards Kompert set for his own work. Kompert too stressed the need for his fiction to appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike, and as we saw earlier, self-conscious historical reflection played a crucial role in both the structure of his narratives and in his initial rediscovery of the ghetto as subject matter. Philippson like Geiger obviously felt the need to police the type of nostalgia that Kompert’s fiction might give rise to, but such critiques should be seen against the backdrop of Kompert’s widespread popularity and the blessings conferred on him by many other German-Jewish luminaries—and not just radical reformers of Lehmann’s bent. Indeed, Marcus Lehmann’s Der Israelit, which overtook Hirsch’s Jeschurun in the 1860s to become the major organ of German-Jewish orthodoxy, expressed enormous enthusiasm for Kompert. In a review published in 1864, Der Israelit characterized him as a “true poet who understands how to grasp Jewish life in such a way as to represent its highly poetic nature in the proper light.” Kompert not only “arouses respect among our non-Jewish fellow citizens for our peculiarities.” His work also helps many Jews “rediscover their lost love for traditional Jewish ways of life.”77 Newspapers that targeted the less orthodox routinely expressed simi-

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

lar sentiments, claiming Kompert as an ideal German-Jewish author, a writer whose work was uniquely suited to bolster Jewish identity because of the universal respect it has secured among the German public. Articles in the Jewish press routinely mentioned the positive reviews of Kompert in the general press, one even waxing on about the fame Kompert enjoyed from Amsterdam to Australia.78 And despite Philippson’s censure, even the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums managed to express enthusiasm for Kompert from time to time. In 1882, Gerson Wolf, the Viennese correspondent for the paper, wrote an article on the occasion of Kompert’s sixtieth birthday where he celebrated Kompert’s “double success”: Jews have read these tales and ennobled themselves in doing so; for they had never been represented in that way, or only to a very limited extent. Kompert was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, but his poetry transfigured the people with whom they lived and among whom they strolled; and these narratives exerted a particular charm on non-Jews and drew them in all the more since they had had no idea about the glorious ideal life among the Jews.79

Like the reviewer in Der Israelit and many other Jewish readers, Wolf celebrated the authenticity and poetry of Kompert’s fiction, assigning Kompert’s aesthetic transfiguration of the ghetto a crucial role in perpetuating a vibrant Jewish identity able to command the respect of the non-Jewish world. Jews and non-Jews alike thus nurtured the insistence on Kompert’s universal appeal and used it to legitimate either tolerance for Jews and Judaism or the cultivation of Jewish identity for acculturating and acculturated Jews. For both Jews and non-Jews, reading such fiction played a key role in sustaining both Jewish identity and the principles of liberal universalism. What is most astonishing is not just that Kompert’s aestheticized version of the Jewish past came to enjoy such widespread cultural currency but that it did so in such a way as to eclipse its historical precedent, becoming for many readers, as we noted in the introduction to this chapter, not just a poetic depiction of life in the Bohemian Judengasse but a shorthand for the entirety of premodern Jewish life. A few final examples can clarify how Kompert’s contemporaries transformed his literary ghettos into a symbolic representation of an entire era. Oppenheim, in his memoirs, when recounting his time studying

103

104

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

art in Munich, speaks of “a long letter, hundreds of pages, in Hebrew letters [from my brother Herz] that portrayed to me the life and times of the Hanau Judengasse in such a lively way that a Kompert would hardly have been able to write it better.”80 For Oppenheim, Kompert’s literary ghettos function as a standard of authenticity by which to judge other modes of representing Jewish traditional life, including that of his own brother’s eyewitness report of the Hanau Judengasse, a region obviously distinct and distant from Kompert’s native Bohemia. Later in life, as we commented earlier, he explicitly cited Kompert as one of the models for his Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben.81 It was not just for Oppenheim that Kompert’s literary ghettos became the measure of historical authenticity. The Moravian ghetto poet Eduard Kulke, a contemporary of Kompert, praised Kompert for the “flame of true poetry” that runs throughout his oeuvre at the same time as he enshrined him as a great cultural historian. Invoking the countless contemporaries who claimed, after reading Kompert, “yes, that’s how it is, that’s exactly how I felt in my youth,” Kulke hailed his peer as a reliable historian not just of the Bohemian ghetto but of the entirety of the recent Jewish past: “If the entire Jewish world were to perish, one would be able to reconstruct it from Kompert’s works.” To prove this extravagant claim, he relates the case of a “mathematician, who for many years has had little to do with Judaism.” This acquaintance, Kulke continues, “is not ashamed to confess to me that he has frequently cried effusively while reading Kompert. Such is the power of the vanished world conjured up by the word of the poet, the world in which this mathematician lived his own childhood.”82 Gerson Wolf, reviewing Kompert’s complete works in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1883, also acclaimed Kompert as a “genuine artist” whose work fills a void given the scarce attention paid to Jewish cultural history over the course of the past several decades. “Kompert’s merit is twofold,” Wolf explains. “He is a poet and as such he has created figures that elevate the spirit and delight the heart. But he is also a cultural historian who represents and orders the existing material with insight and vision.” As a “genuine artist,” Wolf continues, Kompert “brings images to life that are so similar to nature that they appear formally familiar to us. We believe to have seen them before, yet they are poetically transfigured.”83 Wolf, like Kulke, Oppenheim, and others,

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

obviously discerns the difference between poetic fictions and cultural history, and he hardly mistakes Kompert’s fiction for the work of a historian. He does insist, however, that when it comes to remembering the premodern Jewish past, poetic fiction can effectively stand in for cultural history. Wolf clearly does not mourn the passing of the ghetto, but particularly given what he sees as the enormous changes since 1848, he wants the past to be properly commemorated, and he presents Kompert’s fiction as the ideal vessel for such cultural memory. In the obituary for Kompert he published several years later, he celebrated Kompert in similar terms, as the “Auerbach of the ghetto,” a noble Jew who combated the “leveling influence of our age” to salvage the memory of a Jewish past that was “rapidly disappearing.”84 By the end of the century, Kompert had been effectively enshrined as a cultural historian without equal, and not just in the German-speaking world. A book published in Philadelphia by the Jewish Publication Society in 1894, David Philipson’s Old European Jewries, assigned Kompert a position of prominence in its 250–page historical narrative about the rise and fall of the ghetto in a variety of settings—in church legislation, in Frankfurt, in Prague, in Rome, and in Russia. Philipson, an American-born rabbi who was extremely prominent in the reform movement, used his book to trace a “long, sad story of religious repression and sectarian hatred,” a “gloomy chapter in the volume of the dark doings of men.” He concluded his study with a chapter on “The Ghetto in Literature” that celebrated the fact that the ghetto had now found a permanent home in literature, and almost exclusively in literature alone. “The man entitled above all others to the designation, ‘Poet of the Ghetto,’” not surprisingly, “is Leopold Kompert.”85 Even a historical work paid homage to the value of Kompert’s fiction as cultural history, rehearsing the same Schillerian logic of a carefully circumscribed nostalgia for the Jewish past that Lehmann introduced into the debates in 1848. The Austrian journalist Wilhelm Goldbaum—the last figure who will be discussed here—also published a series of works that hailed Kompert as a cultural historian of the entirety of the premodern Jewish past. An 1890 article on the history of the ghetto in Venice published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums is particularly telling. The Italian term ghetto, we remember, was coined in the early sixteenth century to refer to the Venetian Jewish quarter, and it is only in the aftermath of

105

106

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Kompert’s ghetto tales and those of others that it became a more general term to designate premodern Jewish life. Tellingly, by the time Goldbaum wrote his essay entitled “Venetian Ghetto Stories” in 1890, the term ghetto had become so broad in its semantic connotations that Goldbaum used Kompert as a prism for understanding the original ghetto in Venice. In the context of this essay, poetic fiction has overtaken historical reality, and Kompert’s fiction has established itself as the original, the archetype of the ghetto per se. Goldbaum concludes his essay on the Venetian ghetto by invoking Kompert’s fiction as a “moving piece of cultural history that historians should not disregard” when seeking to understand the remnants of ghetto life today and the long history of prejudice and persecution they invoke.86 In an essay published on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Kompert’s death in 1891, Goldbaum wrote that “the ghetto has disappeared from the earth because it had advocates like Leopold Kompert.” As a cultural historian, Goldbaum notes, Kompert did not merely describe a particular ghetto. His poetry helped ensure the destruction of the ghetto per se, and for that reason, Goldbaum continues, reading Kompert today, in 1891, is a “rather nostalgic affair” confronting the reader with “spirits of a bygone era who continue to live” in Kompert’s oeuvre: “The poet dies, but his work remains. And the work delivers testimony not just for him but for his entire era.”87 Jews reading Kompert in 1891, then, do not merely celebrate the destruction of the ghettos of the past. In doing so, they also forge a connection to the individuals whom they can now mourn with the proper level of healthy nostalgia. Reading secular fiction does not merely stand in for mourning for one’s ancestors. It becomes the ideal mode of commemorating the entirety of the recent Jewish past—whether Oppenheim’s Judengasse in Hanau, Jewish quarters in Bohemia, lingering ghettos in Eastern Europe, or premodern Jewish communities anywhere else in Europe.

Ghetto Fiction and the Making of a Literary Subculture Some recent critics have stressed the subversive potential of Kompert’s fiction, likening it to a postcolonial revolt or viewing it through the work of Homi Bhabha as a form of postcolonial mimicry.88 As Ismar

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

Schorsch noted two decades ago in a seminal essay on Oppenheim, the ghetto was typically seen as “the embodiment of Jewish cultural inferiority, social backwardness, economic sterility, and moral depravity.” Against this backdrop, any attempt to claim the ghetto as a positive place of origin that was home to bourgeois virtues necessarily had a subversive dimension.89 The dynamic that this chapter has brought to light, however, calls for caution in considering overt or covert acts of protest that may be embedded within Kompert’s tales. Kompert’s fiction, we have seen, endeavored to promote a community of Jews and non-Jews marked by compassion and respect for the noble sufferings of the Jewish past, and in this way it sought to promote a form of widespread cultural respect for Jews that would solidify their hopes for middle-class status. Clearly, there were elements in the non-Jewish world that treated commitments to Jewish survival with indifference or hostility. Yet even these groups, as we have seen, did not regard Kompert’s fiction as subversive; they tended either to write it off as insignificant or to subordinate its concerns with Jewishness to models of universalism that held little place for Jews as Jews. Those Jewish and non-Jewish readers for whom Kompert was a success, moreover, did not hail the rebellious nature of his work. Rather, they celebrated his ability to claim widespread cultural currency for his literary conception of the recent Jewish past. For these readers, his works took on the function not of challenging hegemonic power structures but of imagining the integration of Central European Jews into both German culture and the middle class. Our analysis of ghetto fiction and its reception underscores the crucial role literature could play in imagining German-Jewish social relations, the way literature could promote a community of Jews and other Germans at the same time as it helped cultivate a distinctly middle-class identity for Jews as Jews. In this sense, Kompert’s fiction complicates David Sorkin’s vision of a German-Jewish subculture as an invisible community, a subculture blind to itself.90 For when it came to its object and its audience, Kompert’s tales were fiercely dedicated to the principle of transparency. Kompert sought to create authentic portraits of traditional Jewish life that were comprehensible to the entire reading public, and his tales did not limit themselves to the insular space of the synagogue, the home, or the networks of Jewish associational life whose de-

107

108

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

velopment Sorkin traces. Rather, Kompert idealized the Jewish past as a site of noble tragedy in the secular medium of print culture, through literature, and in such a way as to seek out the sympathy, blessings, and approval of mainstream German literary life. In a leap of faith, Jews reading Kompert could not just proudly claim his aestheticized vision of life in the Bohemian Jewish ghetto as an authentic representation of their own past, wherever they might hail from. They could also remain confident that non-Jews as well accepted this past as one compatible with middle-class virtues. On one level, to be sure, this confidence may have been misplaced. Not all contemporaries found Kompert’s fiction accessible and deemed it of universal literary value. Indeed, the silence in the Jewish press on the topic of both the Christianizing appropriations Kompert was subject to and the indifference he met with among some non-Jews would seem to support Sorkin’s vision of a subculture lacking in selfconsciousness. Jews may have taken pride in Taillandier’s enthusiastic review in the Revue des deux mondes, but for the most part they chose not to grapple with the way he subsumed ghetto fiction into a masternarrative of Christianity’s erstwhile triumph over Judaism—or to confront the Gartenlaube’s prominently stated lack of interest in Kompert’s fiction. On one level, the Jewish reception of Kompert clearly followed its own logic, and it did so into the 1880s and 1890s, celebrating Kompert as a great German writer well after the general public had started to lose interest in his work. Ultimately, however, there is more at stake in the Jewish reception of Kompert than a Jewish community fatefully blind to its own operations. Clearly, Kompert’s idealization of the Jewish past was not universally accepted, and it is not insignificant that his most prominent successor in the tradition of German-language ghetto fiction, Franzos, was well known for his harsh criticism of ghetto life. Even in his obituary for Kompert, Franzos managed to smuggle in a complaint about his precursor’s predilection for seeing premodern Jewish life through rose-colored glasses.91 But as Franzos noted as well, the perception of Kompert’s universal appeal was much more than a fiction nurtured by a Jewish community eager to move into the ranks of the middle class with ample stores of bourgeois respectability. Jews and non-Jews alike maintained enthusiasm for Kompert’s idealization of the Jewish past,

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

and given that this community was forged through literature, the virtual nature of the community that readers participated in through the solitary pastime of reading fiction was hardly bound to be a problem. Benedict Anderson reminds us that the public constructed through print is always an “imagined community,” a sense of collective belonging mediated by a leap of faith in which individuals come to identify with others whom they neither have met nor will ever meet face to face.92 A community that consumes fictional literature, whatever its claim to authenticity, does not just bring the imagined nature of such community particularly to the foreground. It also calls our attention to the exceptionally productive nature of such leaps of faith when it came to promoting visions of Jews’ integration into the ranks of the middle classes. The question whether it is appropriate to speak of a distinct German-Jewish subculture from the mid-nineteenth century on is an issue that social historians will likely continue to debate for some time. For at least some nineteenth-century German Jews, however, reading Kompert’s ghetto tales made it possible to imagine a world in which a separate subculture would not be necessary, a world in which the German bourgeoisie welcomed Jews into its ranks wholeheartedly because of the cultural capital provided by Kompert’s aesthetic transfiguration of the premodern Jewish past. This sense of integration, to be sure, may have been a function of the imagination, a process mediated by fiction, but it was nevertheless a powerful one—and one that was not the property of Jews alone. Of course, taking pleasure in non-Jews’ appreciation of the tragic nobility of the immediate Jewish past was not the same as social integration. Nor was it meant to be. Most German Jews maintained a much stronger sense of Jewish solidarity than that of the radical reformer Emil Lehmann, who advocated mixed marriages between Jews and Christians as a means to help put Jews on an equal footing in German society. In Chapter 3, accordingly, we shall consider a body of Jewish belles lettres that concerned itself explicitly with the limits of social integration, with promulgating fantasies about love and marriage between Jews. In the context of this material, we shall see, it was not the imagined community between Jews and other Germans that literature brought to the foreground. German-Jewish romance fiction served Jews in other ways, seeking to channel the romantic fantasies so typical

109

110

Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia

of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel into a passionate commitment to Jewish continuity. Kompert’s readers may have put his literary ghettos in the company of Schiller’s classicism. The German-Jewish love stories we will consider in the following chapter, however, borrowed explicitly from disparaged genres of popular culture that made them risk appearing at odds with the dreams of cultural respectability so crucial to German-Jewish belles lettres in general. As we shall discover soon, this issue is important not just because of the challenges of creating Jewish romance novels that might rival their non-Jewish peers. It cuts to the heart of fundamental tensions in the project to create easily accessible yet aesthetically refined literature serving the interests of Jewish continuity.

Th re e  Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of

Romance: Love, Fiction, and the Virtues of Marrying In

Poison for the Youth? Popularity and the Lures of Romance In 1855, a reader from Lemberg, the Austrian regional capital known today as the Ukrainian city of Lviv, wrote Ludwig Philippson to complain. In late 1853, Philippson had started publishing the Jüdisches Volksblatt (Jewish Popular Paper), a weekly literary supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums that had the grandest of ambitions. Building on the success of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Philippson sought with this new project to supply the “Jewish masses” with entertaining and inexpensive reading material that would awaken their Jewish consciousness and promote Jewish pride. The Jüdisches Volksblatt was not the only such project in the 1850s. In 1859, hoping to give Jewish readers “popular literature” written in an “attractive and stimulating manner,” Philippson’s fellow reform rabbis Leopold Stein and Salomon Formstecher launched a similar journal, tellingly called Der Freitagabend, eine Familienschrift (Friday Evening, A Family Journal).1 Like Stein and Formstecher, Philippson published accessible poems, short essays, and simple narrative fiction geared at fortifying his readers’ attachment to Judaism and their sense of solidarity with other Jews, and he too avoided any semblance of a “preacher’s tone” in the Jüdisches Volksblatt.2 Rather than duplicating the synagogue through print, his goal was to offer “pleasant and instructive” reading experiences for the broadest possible segment of the Jewish public, and by the end of its second year of publication, the Jüdisches Volksblatt had found a wide readership, both across German-speaking Europe and in German-Jewish émigré communities in North America.3

111

112

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

For the reader from Lemberg, however, Philippson had it all wrong. Lumping together the Jüdisches Volksblatt with Philippson’s other major projects—the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, his translation of the Hebrew Bible, his lectures on the “religious idea” in Judaism, and the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Israelite Literature), the pioneering Jewish book club he had helped found several months earlier—he asked the simple question why the great publicist could not deliver his readers something more palatable. Why not, he suggested, novels written in the style of Eugène Sue, the popular French writer who produced some of the earliest and most widely read serialized novels of his day?4 Despite his lofty ambitions, in other words, Philippson’s material for instruction and entertainment was simply not entertaining enough to have broad popular appeal. The suggestion that the readers of the Jüdisches Volksblatt would be happier with less ambitious reading material could not be left unanswered, and Philippson mounted a full-fledged counterattack. Soon thereafter he devoted a lead article of the Jüdisches Volksblatt to an essay that responded to the letter with passionate complaints about the “poison” of novel-reading, a “disease” that was apparently infecting Jews “from west to east.”5 “Father, protect your son, mother, protect your daughter from one thing: from reading novels!” the title of the article read, and the piece went on to indict the novel with what some readers would have recognized as familiar charges: Frequent reading of novels is poison for the youth, poison for the understanding, poison for the heart, poison for education [Bildung], poison for real life! Reading novels is the same as eating opium, the same as intoxication from drinking brandy. Lending libraries are the open stalls where this poisoning happens, and now even schools are setting up similar boutiques. With rather cheap editions [of novels] coming out now, everyone can create his or her own storehouse of this unnerving, deafening material. Yes, novels, like opium, produce a curvature of the spine for the spirit. First folk tales, then short stories, and then novels—that’s the path it takes. . . . Whoever gets used to reading novels loses his or her taste for all serious and instructive reading.6

The terms in which the Jüdisches Volksblatt introduced this attack on the disease of novel-reading were hardly original. The claim that novels

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

represented an addictive form of pleasure akin to drug or alcohol use hearkens back to the reading debates that played such an influential role in German public culture in the 1770s and 1780s, the era when novelreading and fiction-reading more generally were first perceived to be a pervasive cultural force in the German lands. In the late eighteenth century, complaints about “reading rage,” “reading addiction,” and a “reading epidemic” helped fuel a widespread distrust of the pleasures of sentimental, escapist fiction that served for some intellectuals as a convenient foil against which to define the mission of high culture.7 As luminaries such as Karl Philipp Moritz, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller characterized it, great art ennobled and built character, serving as the source of a disinterested form of pleasure that enabled readers to rise above historical contingencies to experience their true humanity. The type of popular entertainment aligned with the novel, on the other hand, was an addictive, hallucinatory, and socially corrosive form of pleasure, one that alienated readers from the real world, unleashed romantic fantasies, and encouraged an unending cycle of identification with imaginary heroes and heroines. By the mid 1850s, the Jüdisches Volksblatt would have us believe, Jews from east to west had thus thoroughly assimilated the obsessive reading practices that intellectual elites typically identified with European popular culture more generally. But Philippson’s journal did more than complain. It also offered up a solution, thanks to a reader who wrote in from a town near Lake Balaton in Hungary to propose what he called a “radical cure for this stubborn disease of our people.”8 To be sure, the author conceded, “the sons and daughters of Israel tend to know more about the most recent novels than about writings dealing with religion or education.” But the party to blame for this “cancerous disease” is Jewish parents, and particularly Jewish mothers, who are themselves all too happily addicted to the novels of Sue and Alexandre Dumas. Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) and other international best-sellers, was, along with Sue, one of the two most popular authors in nineteenth-century German lending libraries, those “open stalls” of “poisoning” singled out by the Jüdisches Volksblatt for their role in promoting novel-reading.9 Yet our reader from Hungary did not simply demonize popular fiction and the women who presided over Jewish homes. He proposed an institutional response, suggesting

113

114

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

that the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur launch the careers of Jewish writers who would produce novels that would give Jews “divine, interesting and attractive reading for their leisure hours.” Contemporary Jews, the author suggests, need their own Dumas, and Philippson thus needed to take a leading role in disseminating Jewish novels that could be every bit as thrilling and addictive as the most popular fiction of the day.10 Philippson claimed to welcome this challenge in a footnote, and indeed, during its eighteen years of operation, from 1855 to 1873, under the editorial control of Philippson and his coeditors Adolf Jellinek and Isaac Jost, the Institut widely disseminated more than ten major works of fiction, in addition to publishing and republishing the Philippson brothers’ multivolume anthology, Saron.11 As Nils Roemer has argued, the Institut transformed the Jewish book into a “commodity for individual consumption,” placing 200,000 copies of its fifty-five titles in libraries and private collections across Europe and the United States, and as a result, it wielded tremendous influence over the German-Jewish book market.12 When it came to narrative fiction, the Institut followed Philippson’s own preferences for the historical novel and published historical fiction almost exclusively. Since the late eighteenth century, sentimental tales of love, romance, and family life had been flooding the book market in increasing numbers, giving rise to a huge volume of novels whose plots fueled their readers’ romantic fantasies and celebrated new ideals of marriage as a union based in reciprocal love between partners who choose each other freely only to find their individuality validated and authenticated through romantic love.13 Writers such as August Lafontaine (1758–1831) and H. Clauren (a pseudonym for Carl Gottlieb Samuel Heun, 1771–1854) were enormously popular in their day, producing scores of best-selling novels that inexorably earned the scorn of critics. Literary and intellectual elites typically viewed this new genre of the Liebesroman or romance novel with disdain for its escapism and special potential to foster addiction, and not surprisingly, the leadership of the Institut steered clear of anything that looked like formulaic tales of romance inevitably culminating in blissful marriage. Apart from a volume of Eduard Kulke’s ghetto tales that it put out in 1869, only one of the major works of fiction the Institut published was not a historical novel, and this was In Banden frei (Free in Bonds, 1865),

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

a 742–page novel by the Danzig-born writer Rahel Meyer.14 As we shall discover later in this chapter, despite the marriage that concludes In Banden frei, Meyer’s novel bore scant resemblance to popular fiction about love and romance. The Institut disseminated In Banden frei to its subscribers in the same year as Eugenie Marlitt, the most popular German romance novelist of the late nineteenth century, began to publish her fiction in the best-selling family journal, the Gartenlaube.15 Unlike Marlitt’s novels, which critics have typically vilified as the epitome of nineteenth-century “trivial literature,” In Banden frei strategically defined itself in opposition to popular literary forms, introducing itself as a female, Jewish Bildungsroman (novel of education), a piece of literature that deserved to be considered high culture. Publishing popular literature for the Jewish masses, in other words, was a complicated affair, and Philippson was hardly ready to let his Jüdisches Volksblatt become a Jewish opium den. A short story Philippson published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt in 1862 made clear what might be expected of both the Institut’s publications and Jewish belles lettres more generally. In this tale, the new Jewish teacher in town, a “very nice and attractive young man” named Herr Magnus, pays a visit to a certain Frau Meyering, who is introduced as an example of the type of “Jewish woman whose husband has or seems to have lots of money and plays or seems to play an important role” in town.16 Hearing that Frau Meyering enjoys the reputation of being a “supporter of literature and the arts,” Herr Magnus asks her to take out a subscription to the publications of the Institut. Needless to say, this request angers her terribly, not least of all because it reminds her of the local bookseller, who had the “audacity to send me a complimentary issue of some [Allgemeine] Zeitung des Judentums and a Jüdisches Volksblatt—as if I belonged to the ‘Jewish people,’ indeed!” In her social dealings, this parvenu steadfastly avoids fellow Jews, even hiding from her servants that she is Jewish. For her, “Jewish writings” conjures up images of the incomprehensible books written in Hebrew characters that her grandmother read. The last thing she would want to do would be “‘to place a book like that on my book table’—she pointed to a table loaded down with rich albums and books decorated with gold paint—‘so that everyone whom I entertain can recognize immediately that we are Jews.’” Magnus’s insistence that the writings of the Institut are nothing to be ashamed of, that they

115

116

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

“are just as instructive as they are tasteful,” falls on deaf ears: “O, please, what can be tasteful about Jewish matters, and whatever could these writings teach me—spare me this!”17 For this parvenu obsessed with upward mobility, Jewish books will never be able to compete with expensive coffee table books designed for ostentatious display. But for those who are invested in Jewish continuity and who truly care about literature and the arts—for the readers of this vignette in the Jüdisches Volksblatt, we are to assume—Jewish belles lettres harbors the potential to be superior to Frau Meyering’s gold-plated volumes purchased for show. For part of what Jewish books do is to make Judaism tasteful, to grant Judaism aesthetic respectability, and they do so not because of their upscale exteriors but because of their substance, because like this vignette they fortify the type of solidarity with the Jewish reading public that Frau Meyering so despairingly lacks. The great advantage of the type of popular Jewish literature Philippson sought to disseminate, we are told, is that it can claim aesthetic respectability in the non-Jewish world at the same time as it promotes internal Jewish interests.18 As much as Philippson’s paper wanted to entertain, then, it also had a pedagogical mission that prevented it from giving readers such as the man from Lemberg the type of reading pleasure they wanted. Jewish belles lettres was intended to be serious entertainment, literature that could command respect, and yet at the same time, as the tale of Frau Meyering makes clear, its function was never just that of negotiating respectability. This literature was meant to create a vibrant Jewish community through print, using Jews’ leisure time as a means of strengthening their attachment to Judaism. Within this model of middlebrow culture, disseminating literature that was merely entertaining or producing romance novels that would cater to those real or imagined women readers who were poorly supervising their children’s reading material to begin with simply had no place. Philippson’s model of belles lettres claimed to have little use for the pleasures of addictive reading, romantic fantasies of love and marriage, and the lures of escapist fiction. Sentimental tales of love and marriage were thus slated to play a minimal role in the vision of a popular yet aesthetically refined Jewish literature that Philippson took such pains to realize. For most of the nineteenth century, accordingly, critical discussions of Jewish belles

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

lettres in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and other papers concentrated almost entirely on historical fiction and the ghetto tale.19 The fact remains, nevertheless, that this period also saw the publication of many tales of Jewish romance, fictions of love and marriage that clearly mimicked the formulaic novels glorifying romantic love that literary elites typically frowned on. Despite his preference for the ennobling power of historical fiction, even Philippson recognized that readers wanted fiction about the contemporary world; when it came to fictional treatments of nineteenth-century family life, there was a distinct disparity between theory and practice, between programmatic statements for the development of Jewish belles lettres and the literary texts that were actually published in Jewish print media.20 Back in 1838, Philippson himself published a model German-Jewish love story in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums,21 and in the 1850s and 1860s, the Jüdisches Volksblatt published numerous novellas and short stories focused on love and marriage: tales about the trials and tribulations of young lovers, in exotic places, in urban settings, and in villages in the German countryside; fictions about beloved governesses who marry their employers; and stories about Jewish men and women who find true love and subsequently create happy bourgeois homes.22 A four-page paper that appeared weekly was ill equipped to serialize full-length novels, and apart from Philippson’s narratives, many of which were subsequently reprinted in Saron, few of these texts were ever published again. The two authors who managed to publish major novels about GermanJewish romance, moreover, met the same fate. Like many of the tales in the Jüdisches Volksblatt, Rahel Meyer’s 786–page novel Zwei Schwestern (Two Sisters, 1853) and Salomon Formstecher’s 299–page family saga Buchenstein und Cohnberg (Buchenstein and Cohnberg, 1863) offered up distinctly Jewish tales of love and romance. Despite considerable attention in the German-Jewish press, neither of these two novels ever went into a second edition.23 This chapter studies a sizeable body of popularly oriented literature, then, that led a subterranean existence, a series of novellas and novels that for the most part failed to secure the formal blessings of the German-Jewish literary establishment. Historical fiction and the ghetto tale both found their niches on the book market, and the texts we considered in Chapters 1 and 2 were frequently reprinted throughout the

117

118

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

nineteenth century and translated into any number of languages. The same is true, moreover, for the tradition of orthodox belles lettres that emerged in the 1860s and that we will be studying in Chapter 4, a corpus of literature that continued to be published and translated into English, Hebrew, and Yiddish well into the late twentieth century. German-Jewish love stories, however, came onto the scene without major Jewish institutional support. On a general level, the genre that we are studying in this chapter clearly survived the nineteenth century, finding canonical expression in later exemplars of the German-Jewish family novel such as Georg Herrmann’s Jettchen Gebert (1906) or Auguste Hauschner’s Die Familie Lowositz (1908).24 For the most part, however, none of the actual specimens of this genre from the nineteenth century became a permanent fixture of German-Jewish literary life. The body of literature we are studying in this chapter is important, then, less because of the success of its individual titles than because of its collective aspirations, because of the creative ways it appropriated popular-cultural narratives about romance to create a tradition of middlebrow fiction that might play a crucial role in guaranteeing Jewish continuity. Herrmann’s Jettchen Gebert and Hauschner’s Die Familie Lowositz both used the institution of the family to articulate broad critiques of German-Jewish culture and bourgeois family life. The nineteenth-century texts under study in this chapter, in contrast, tended to glorify the Jewish family and embrace bourgeois fantasies of love and marriage, often without the least bit of reservation. Indeed, critical attitudes toward marriage as a guarantor of eternal love or toward the emergent bourgeois gender roles sustaining this idealized vision of marriage are largely absent from this literature. Novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Virtue Rewarded (1740) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, Or the New Heloise, 1761), which became classics over the course of the nineteenth century, promoted new ideals of love in a complex fashion, often reflecting critically on emergent visions of marriage. For many critics today, not surprisingly, one of the distinguishing features of the canonical literature of German Romanticism is the critical stance it takes toward the naïve equation of romantic love with living happily ever after so typical of the popular novels of the period.25 German-Jewish romance fiction, however, tended to promote fantasies of love culminating in marriage in much more simplistic and

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

formulaic terms, dedicating its energies instead to creating scenarios where falling in love with a future mate typically went hand in hand with falling in love with Judaism itself. In this sense, these texts can hardly be written off as “escapist”; they performed a cultural function that is crucial for our own understanding of the more general role that belles lettres played in German-Jewish life.26 In this regard, it will hardly be surprising that these texts bring to the foreground a dynamic we have encountered in other chapters as well. These narratives of love and romance were obviously ill equipped to appeal to the unlikely Christian or secular readers who would have found themselves perusing the Jüdisches Volksblatt or picking up a novel about love and intrigue written by a reform rabbi. Yet promoting fantasies of marrying within the faith was precisely the point of these tales of Jewish love and Jewish marriage, and in accomplishing this task, they did something that contemporary mainstream fiction could not. As a point of comparison, we might briefly consider the novels of Fanny Lewald (1811–1889), a popular writer who was born to a Jewish family in Königsberg but who converted to Protestantism as a teenager. Extremely well known in her day, many of Lewald’s novels such as Jenny (1843) are still in print today. Lewald often portrayed Jews living in a Jewish milieu, but her Jewish characters tended to lack any deep connection to Judaism or Jewish tradition. Jenny, for instance, centers on the depiction of the Meier family, liberal Jews reared in Enlightenment values who suffer discrimination and who thus feel political solidarity with other Jews; when it comes to selecting futures mates, nevertheless, neither Jenny Meier nor her physician brother Eduard has any commitment to marrying within the faith. The ideal that the novel invokes, instead, is that of a civil marriage between Jews and Christians. Jewish readers certainly appreciated Lewald’s positive and sympathetic portrayals of Jews and they often identified with her liberal politics. At the same time, her lack of a positive sense of the mission of Judaism as a living tradition set her up for frequent criticism in the Jewish press.27 In marked contrast to Jenny, the novels and novellas considered in this chapter were overwhelmingly concerned with romance between Jews, with ensuring that fantasies about love and marriage would be linked to a renewed commitment to Judaism. Most Jews in the nineteenth century, we know, did not get married because they fell in love the way

119

120

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

characters in romance novels did. For Jews—as for other middle-class Germans—marriages were typically arranged, although the manner in which parents engineered matches for their children changed over time to accommodate the ideals of the companionate marriage that literature had been promoting since the late eighteenth century.28 The texts under study in this chapter are important because they represented one of the major arenas in which nineteenth-century Jewish culture grappled with new ideals of marriage and domestic life, underscoring for us the crucial role that popular-cultural visions of love and romance were called on to play in sustaining a community dedicated to Jewish ideals of endogamy. Starting with Philippson himself, as we shall discover in the next section, Jewish writers drew productively on these models of love and romance, transforming them so that novelistic love would go hand in hand with love for a rejuvenated Jewish tradition. As fantasies of love were marshaled up to sustain fantasies of Jewish community, this literature inevitably differentiated itself from the disparaged popular genres it drew on. Even without the explicit blessings of the institutions presiding over the dissemination of Jewish belles lettres, these texts insisted on their own central cultural function, setting themselves off from the allegedly escapist pleasures of popular culture that they explicitly drew on. In this sense, we shall see, these texts offer crucial insights into the forms and functions of German-Jewish middlebrow culture. They do so, moreover, in such a way as to reveal what a crucial category gender was to the mission of creating a distinctly modern tradition of Jewish belles lettres for a popular audience.

Love, Romance, and the Making of Jewish Community In 1838, several months after he had finished serializing his brother’s Die Marannen in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Philippson presented his readers with what he called a “Jewish-religious novella” of his own, a story called “Die Gegensätze” (The Opposites) in which a university-educated young Jewish man by the name of Jonathan Löwe falls in love and eventually gets engaged to Julie Kaspar, a beautiful and intelligent young Jewish woman whose father is the sworn enemy of Jonathan’s father.29 Aware that the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

was designed to appeal to both male and female readers, Philippson started this modern-day rendition of Romeo and Juliet with an editorial comment addressing each of these groups separately. For the male readers, he noted that a fragment of this novella had been published earlier in his short-lived Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin (1834–1837), a journal that targeted rabbis and Jewish educators, and readers familiar with the Predigt- und Schulmagazin would presumably have found little to stumble over in the academic discussions between Jonathan and his non-Jewish friend Ludolph about the relationship between Jewish tradition and classical scholarship that occupy the first several pages of Philippson’s novella. When it came to the women he hoped to attract with this new genre of literature, Philippson took a different tack. He beseeched his female readers “not to be scared off by the all too serious color of the first installment.”30 If women would persevere, Philippson assured them, he would deliver precisely the love story they apparently had every right to expect. As a “Jewish-religious novella,” “Die Gegensätze” thus pursues a twofold agenda. It weds a love story to Jonathan’s Löwe’s extensive ruminations on the need to engage with Jewish tradition from a distinctly modern perspective and his burning desire to use his university education to become a public intellectual who will help his fellow Jews “through writings, words and deed.”31 For Philippson, creating literature for both women and men in this manner means bridging the gap between his female readers’ presumed love of romance and his male readers’ apparent predilection for grappling with big questions about the status of Judaism in the modern world. “Die Gegensätze” may not be one of the nineteenth century’s great masterpieces of narrative fiction, but once it gets underway, it does manage to create a plot that brings these two dimensions together in a skillful manner. The basic theme of the novella is the attempt to reconcile the unfortunate opposites that characterize contemporary Jewish life, namely, the rift between traditional Jewish forms of piety and the opportunism and materialism of upwardly mobile Jews who turn their back on traditional Judaism and pay lip service to visions of a universal humanity. “Die Gegensätze” portrays these two extremes through the opposition of the pious Löwe family to the wealthy Kaspar family. The two fathers, both widowers, had once been close friends but have grown apart over the years,

121

122

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

particularly since the deaths of their wives. It is the love between their children Jonathan and Julie that triumphs against all odds that symbolizes what lies in store for Jews in the future, and the novella makes this explicit at numerous points. As Jonathan explains in the letter to Ludolph that concludes the tale, for instance, the love he and Julie share bridges the gap between traditional piety and a modern world indifferent to religion, overcoming the disjunction between “knowledge” and “law” that characterizes the extremes of the contemporary Jewish condition, and “that is why we are happy: religion has realized its true nature through our bond.”32 Clearly, this union has symbolic value. In Philippson’s novella, Judaism serves as the foundation of marital bliss at the same time as marriage serves as a metaphor for the work of reconciling extremes that Judaism faces in the present. Like any good romance novel, Philippson’s tale is full of intrigue, and the twists and turns of the plot give further insight into the distinguishing features of German-Jewish romance fiction. Our lovers first meet in Jonathan’s university town, when he encounters Julie visiting her aunt, and they carefully keep their romance a secret. As soon as they begin their clandestine meetings in their home town, however, all is not well. Back in the real world, they are forced to acknowledge their religious differences. Julie, who had little in the way of a religious education, accuses Jonathan of being trapped “by bonds that a strong man should liberate himself from”; while she loves “the Mosaic religion” because its doctrines are rational and give comfort to her heart, she fails to see what this “would have to do with Judaism, this product of the Middle Ages.”33 Within their relationship, Jonathan proves his strength—and his masculinity—by taking on a pedagogical role vis-à-vis his future wife, agreeing with her that Judaism needs a reform but stressing the need for a unified Jewish community that would modernize itself in such a way as to connect with past traditions and consolidate itself.34 For Jonathan, needless to say, Judaism is a powerful living tradition, not a medieval remnant. After a while he finds an eager pupil in Julie, and through her love in turn, Jonathan finally feels that he has overcome the isolation promoted by the “dead letter” of traditional Jewish piety.35 Once the lovers resolve their differences, however, they face another threat, the opposition of Julie’s father. Julie, known for her indepen-

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

dent spirit to begin with, truly comes into her own through her romance with Jonathan, and predictably, this sets her in opposition to her materialistically minded father. Unbeknownst to Jonathan, Julie, and Ludolph, Herr Kaspar has already arranged a match between Julie and the non-Jew Ludolph—solely for financial reasons. Not surprisingly, Julie is disgusted that “my father is thinking about a connection for life as easily as one would think about making a simple purchase,” expecting her to change her religion just as one would move into a new apartment, and she thus resolves to fight for her sense of what is right.36 In keeping with the novella’s ideals of women’s relative passivity, Julie does so by enlisting the help of Jonathan, who makes an impassioned speech to the banker about the grand significance of their union for the future of the Jewish community. Listening to Jonathan, Herr Kaspar suddenly recalls standing at his wife’s deathbed along with Jonathan’s father as his wife uttered her last request to allow Julie one day to marry the son of her departed dear friend Sarah Löwe. Honoring his wife’s last will and testament, Herr Kaspar gives the couple his blessing. Soon thereafter, when he almost dies in a storm and loses his entire fortune, his future son-in-law comes to the rescue again, reconciling the Löwe and the Kaspar families and the extremes of modern Jewish life that they symbolize. For Jonathan and Julie, falling in love with each other means falling in love with Judaism itself, and in this sense, it is crucial for the plot of the novella that the conflict between fathers and daughters so characteristic of the genre of the bourgeois tragedy we discussed in Chapter 1 find a quick and easy resolution. In finding true love, Jonathan and Julie ultimately do not rebel against their parents; they realize their parents’ ultimate desires, with their union serving as the living testament to their two mothers’ dying wishes. Romantic love, the readers of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums are taught, thus never unfolds in true opposition to parental authority and filial piety. Rather, romance grounded in a common love for Judaism brings families together, healing rifts across generations to give young Jewish men and women a validated sense of self within a larger vibrant community. The grand ideals of a rejuvenated Jewish community that Jonathan Löwe wants to fight for professionally, in other words, find themselves realized through romance, through the creation of new family bonds that fortify old ones.

123

124

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

In this sense, this inaugural “religious-Jewish novella” fulfills perfectly its goal of being required reading for men and women alike, rendering its concerns with the status of Judaism in the modern world inextricable from a concern with love and marriage that both male and female Jews alike should take an interest in. In much nineteenth-century fiction, romantic love typically figured as a threat to Jewish continuity, not least of all through the figure of the “beautiful Jewess” who so often found love in the arms of a Christian suitor and achieved redemption through conversion.37 In Philippson’s novella, in contrast, romance between Jews leads to a renewed commitment to both Judaism as a religion and the Jewish community as a whole. “Die Gegensätze” is important here because it is the first in a long line of novellas by Philippson that sought to inspire male and female readers with distinctly Jewish fantasies of love and romance. Not all of these tales, to be sure, saw the world with the same rosecolored glasses as his inaugural novella. Philippson’s “Förderung und Hemmniß” (Challenge and Hindrance, 1841), for instance, tells the tale of a hypochondriac suffering from Jewish self-hatred whose obsessive reading practices as a young man set him up for disaster: he falls desperately in love with a Christian woman named Theodore with whom he spent his leisure time reading. The two readers realize they can have no future together, and tragically, Theodore dies soon thereafter in a coach accident. It is only years later, when the hypochondriac befriends a fellow Jew at a spa, that he comes to see Judaism not as a hindrance but as a challenge and takes his new friend’s advice to spend his free time reading the Hebrew Bible.38 In Philippson’s “Speicher, Bude und Salon” (Storehouse, Stall, and Salon, 1864), we are likewise introduced to Sarah Wolf, an attractive young woman who, believing in the omnipotence of love, falls in love with a count and turns her back on the “faith of her fathers.”39 Later in life, trapped in a loveless marriage, she regrets her apostasy. She subsequently abandons her husband and converts back to Judaism, immersing herself in Jewish charity work and dedicating her fortune to her pet project, a school for poor girls that aspires to give Jewish teenagers the religious education she herself missed out on. For the most part, however, such unhappy tales of betrayal and apostasy are the exception, not the rule. The orthodox fictions of contem-

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

porary life we will consider in Chapter 4 frequently rely on a pedagogy of fear, laying out the dire consequences of straying from Jewish law with classic melodramatic excess. The literature we are concerned with here, however, tends to favor simpler and more positive models of Jewish marital bliss, fantasies of Jewish domesticity where romantic love goes hand in hand with filial piety. In Philippson’s short story “Die Begegnung” (The Encounter, 1863), for instance, we meet the Fels family caught in a rain storm while on the last leg of their lengthy journey to a spa. Obsessed with upward mobility, with “elegance,” “fine clothes,” and “entertainment,” Herr and Frau Fels are hoping to use their vacation to make the acquaintance of two young men, the brothers Michael and Joseph Feldberg, who a friend thinks might make suitable matches for their marriage-age daughters Friederike and Luise.40 When they pass by two young men who are not terribly well dressed but who seem nevertheless to be both Jews and “people of sufficient social status,” Friederike and Luise want to stop, noting that they are duty-bound to help Jews in need. The father, lacking his daughters’ healthy sense of solidarity with his coreligionists, refuses: “I can’t come marching along at the spa with an entire cargo of Jews, as if I were some transport or immigration agent for the sons of Israel!”41 Minutes later, when they encounter a countess and her three daughters caught in the rain, the father is all too happy to offer the aristocrats a ride in his coach. The rest of the narrative tells a tale of redemption for the Fels’s lack of a healthy Jewish identity. That evening at the spa restaurant, the countess and her daughters snub the Fels family, and Herr and Frau Fels continue to ignore the two young Jewish bachelors. Unsuspecting that the two young men whom they refused to help are the Feldberg brothers, they decide to make the best of their vacation, and all is well— that is, until Friederike falls off a cliff while hiking in the mountains. After considerable efforts and much heroism, Michael Feldberg comes to her rescue, with the assistance of his brother, and saves her from death. Moved by gratitude, the father apologizes for his “sinful pride.” Later that day, when he realizes that the Feldberg brothers were in fact the two eligible bachelors they were supposed to meet, he is overtaken with shame and embarrassment. As a result of his soul-searching, Herr Fels develops a healthy degree of Jewish pride, and we are told quickly at the end of the tale that several months later, Michael Feldberg mar-

125

126

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

ried Luise and Joseph Feldberg married Friederike. As the narrator explains, “the moral of the story should be self-evident.”42 Like in the world imagined in “Die Gegensätze,” in “Die Begegnung” there are ultimately no conflicts between fathers and daughters. Once Herr Fels abandons his upwardly mobile fascination with the nobility and learns to rely on his fellow Jews to keep his family intact, his daughters are rewarded with the promising young bachelors they deserve. Dreams come true for both father and daughters, that is, only when the proper sense of Jewish solidity becomes a guiding principle in everyday life. When it comes to Jewish romance, father-daughter tensions typically rear their head only to be eliminated, and the readers of these tales are taught over and over again that true love will bring Jewish families together across generations. In “Eine Familiengeschichte” (A Family Story, 1854), a tale Philippson published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt under the pseudonym Ludwig Schragge, Philippson dealt with the issue head on. The plot revolves around “the dominant belief and a belief in which the daughters of Judah are raised, namely, that there can be no peace in a home without the blessings of one’s parents.”43 Philippson tells the story of a young couple, Joseph and Mirjam. Joseph’s parents, albeit of humble origins, have worked hard to establish themselves and are confident that their wealth and standing will enable Joseph to marry into one of the best houses in town. Accordingly, they are horrified when he falls in love with Mirjam, a cleaning woman whose father is a peddler and whose mother is a cook. Blind to their son’s claims “that these are honest people and that there are no real differences among Jews,” the mother insists that her son is being seduced by a tramp after his money, and both parents are dead set against the match.44 Joseph, committed to marrying the woman of his dreams, leaves home, works hard, and quickly establishes himself as a successful businessman. When he and Mirjam marry, eighteen months later, his parents do not even respond to the wedding invitation. Mirjam deeply regrets entering into marriage without the blessings of Joseph’s parents, and as a result a “dark veil” hangs over the young couple’s domestic bliss.45 It takes years for Mirjam to get pregnant, and she finally gives birth to a son only to lose him in early infancy. Eventually, Mirjam manages to become pregnant again, and while the son she gives birth to the second time around prospers initially, he becomes

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

gravely ill as a toddler. As a good “daughter of Judah,” Mirjam knows that it is the curse of Joseph’s parents that is ruining her domestic bliss, and with her son near death, she entreats Joseph to get his parents to visit and bless the child, saving both him and her from a sure death. As soon as Joseph drops by his parents’ home and explains his situation, his father rushes to Mirjam and her child’s bedside to pray with and for them. As one would expect, the child recovers, and Joseph’s father ultimately gets his wife to reconcile with her son and daughter-in-law and welcome her grandson into her family. All is well that ends well, we are told, and in the context of a tale like this, it becomes clear why Jewish writers using literature to bolster the Jewish identity of their readers would deem the plot lines of bourgeois tragedy in need of repair. Young Jews have a right to romance, we are taught, but romance can prosper and end in a happy marriage only with the proper parental blessings. In the worlds imagined in these tales, reconciliation is always possible among Jews, whatever the socioeconomic differences among them, and Jewish parents and children need to join forces to recognize and respect each others’ rights and thus make true romance possible. Unlike in contemporary fiction by non-Jews, romance here is not a threat to Jewish continuity but its guarantee, a means of bonding parents and children together to create households grounded in both romantic love and the blessings of the Jewish community as a whole. In this sense, whatever their addictive qualities, these fantasies of love and romance were anything but escapist. These stories actively encouraged Jews to imagine finding self-fulfillment through fantasies of romantic love that were at once fantasies of being part of a larger Jewish community. Not every German-Jewish romance used intergenerational strife to articulate these ideals. Both Der Freitagabend and the Jüdisches Volkblatt, for instance, published numerous tales about redemptive love between Jewish orphans, stories about young Jewish men and women who manage to find domestic bliss in the complete absence of parental guidance or interference.46 And the last two narratives to be discussed in this section—a novella set during the American Civil War in New Orleans and a tale about a Jewish governess reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—also followed the trials and tribulations of Jewish orphans to make their way in the world and find love and romance. Both of these

127

128

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

stories do so, moreover, in such a way as to reflect explicitly on the ideal gender roles that make up a Jewish marriage, delivering their readers fantasies of Jewish love and romance that served as conduct books for proper Jewish marital behavior as well. In Buchenstein und Cohnberg, Formstecher creates a caricature of the premodern Jewish wife in Veilchen Cohnberg, a woman who lacks a “mother’s heart,” cares little for domestic life, and devotes herself obsessively to running the family business while her husband Abraham studies Talmud. Clearly, this couple marks the antithesis of the idealized romantic union that Julie Kaspar forges with Jonathan Löwe, Philippson’s modern Jewish intellectual, in “Die Gegensätze.” Indeed, Madame Cohnberg lacks all feeling for “art and scholarship,” we are told, and “love of humanity and domestic bliss were only empty terms for her.” As she herself comments at one point in the novel, “the main question in closing bonds of matrimony is and should always remain ‘How is business doing? What are we earning? How much are we setting aside?’ Love, harmony of the heart, agreement between the opinions and desires of bride and groom are overexcited things for books, not for life.”47 In contrast to Madame Cohnberg—who at one point holds her daughter under house arrest to keep her away from the reform rabbi who is her love interest—the young men and women who pursue love in German-Jewish romance fiction typically seek to create homes where Judaism is truly a family affair. Neither business arrangements nor the study of sacred texts are the forces that shape the idyllic dreams of marital bliss that these tales promote. Instead, they promote a Jewish version of the cult of domesticity that was such an important signature of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, and they do so by campaigning for gender roles radically distinct from those Formstecher caricatures in Buchenstein und Cohnberg.48 The protagonist of Philippson’s tale “Die Union” (The Union, 1864) is a young New Orleans Jew named Robert Richardson, an orphan who learned about Judaism from a German-born teacher who “had fled the oppression that our brothers had to suffer in the Old World” to pursue freedom in the New World. As a young boy, Richardson mastered the details of Jewish observance and acquired a deep sense of both the spiritual truths and universalist dimensions of Jewish tradition, learning from his teacher that “the particular mission of our tribe [Stamm]

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

is to pursue the equality of all human beings and to help fight for the freedom of all our human brethren.”49 As a result, Richardson is morally opposed to slavery and harbors a deep hatred of the Jewish confederate minister Judah P. Benjamin for his “fourfold betrayal: of humanity, of liberty, of his religion and of his fatherland.”50 The title of the novella refers on one level to the war between the states, to Richardson’s sympathies with the union cause, and indeed, much of the tale is devoted to intrigue relating to Richardson’s dealings with both Judah P. Benjamin and Benjamin Butler, the union army general who oversaw the occupation of New Orleans. Published while the war was still going on, “Die Union” purports to gives its German readers an almost real-time account of events in the United States. But the primary motor behind the plot is a different sort of union, the love story between Richardson and his fiancée Antonie de Castro, the daughter of a wealthy Sephardic banker in New Orleans. At the beginning of the novella, when we meet Antonie, we learn that her love for her fiancé is mixed with jealousy, with dissatisfaction that she apparently fails to command all of his attention. “Liberty, humanity, the union, the republic, the ugly emancipation of the slaves, this treacherous spirit moving through our country with all horrors of the night”—the world of public affairs—she complains, seems to be ruining the “innermost sanctuary of the heart.”51 For Richardson, who feels that his liberal political principles are dictated by his Judaism, her lack of support is troubling. “The holiest calling of a wife,” he notes, is to provide a domestic refuge from the public realm, “to make the grace and the charm of the home compensate her husband for the difficult battles he cannot withdraw from” in the outside world.52 However much she might love her fiancé, at this point in the novella Antonie is hardly ready to become an ideal Jewish wife, a woman who would realize her sacred calling by creating an emotionally rewarding home life that would support her husband’s valiant efforts in the public sphere. And soon enough, we are told, Richardson is “suddenly torn out of the darkness of private life into the bright light of the public.”53 His treacherous friend Seldom, an attorney with designs on Antonie, denounces him to Judah P. Benjamin for being a radical and union sympathizer, and Richardson is forced to flee the South in haste and eventually joins the union army. Both Antonie and her father, Perez, cannot begin to

129

130

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

understand the Jewish principles that guide his decision, and they similarly pay no attention to his insistence that maintaining faith in God will ensure that true love will prevail. After the usual trials and tribulations—Seldom, among other things, prints fake newspapers announcing Richardson’s death that he arranges to fall into Antonie’s hands—Richardson and Antonie reunite in New Orleans after it is occupied by union troops. Antonie finally comes to appreciate her husband’s need to act on his Jewish principles, and soon thereafter, Perez de Castro dies happily in his daughter’s arms, knowing she has found love with a good Jewish man. After yet another tour of duty with the union army, Richardson and Antonie wed and, we are to assume, live happily ever after. In keeping with the ideals of woman’s role in the home voiced at the beginning of the novella, Richardson does not merely find domestic bliss; he becomes a patriotic warrior for justice and righteousness, a Jewish man living out the ideals of Judaism in the public sphere amply supported by a loving wife at home. Recent historians have noted that the new gender order that emerged from nineteenth-century Jews’ identification with bourgeois culture gave rise not just to a distinctly Jewish version of the cult of domesticity but to a whole host of new public roles for Jewish women as educators, activists, and members of voluntary organizations.54 In Philippson’s fantasies of Jewish love and romance that we are considering in this section, tellingly, moving between the private and public spheres appears as the sole provenance of Jewish men. Jewish women are idealized as love interests, as wives, and as mothers, with little sense that the creation of bourgeois households might enable Jewish women to find self-fulfillment in any arena that was not the sphere of domestic bliss. Nowhere is this clearer than in one of the most sophisticated pieces of romance fiction that Philippson published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt, a 1863 novella called “Die Gouvernante” (The Governess), which was subsequently republished in Saron.55 “Die Gouvernante” tells the story of a not so beautiful but highly intelligent Jewish governess named Franziska who falls in love with her mysterious widower employer, Dr. Anselm, pierces through the veil of secrecy surrounding the other woman in his life, and eventually marries Dr. Anselm and lives happily ever after. Jewish families employing governesses in nineteenth-century Ger-

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

many were often concerned about hiring qualified Jewish servants with the proper level of religious training, and to some extent this novella obviously participated in such discussions.56 Philippson’s protagonist not only enjoys teaching Anselm’s daughters, Luise and Anna, about both Judaism and secular subjects. She does so extremely well, and she is as happy to be in a home where Jewish ritual is taken seriously as she is delighted to be living in a household with a “small library of the best classics in the main European languages” and a salon full of “journals and the best products of modern literature.”57 Ultimately, however, there is more at stake in “Die Gouvernante” than creating a fantasy of an exceptionally qualified Jewish domestic. Outside the pages of novels, few nineteenth-century governesses ever married their employers.58 In telling a tale of a plain-Jane governess who became the true mistress of her household, Philippson was doing more than contributing to debates about the qualifications of domestic servants. He was drawing on a long literary tradition of governess fictions such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a novel that had appeared in several different German translations since 1850.59 In offering his readers a German-Jewish version of Jane Eyre, Philippson created a fantasy of Jewish romance that inevitably stressed the fundamental similarities between German-Jewish bourgeois culture and the emergent classics of Victorian domestic fiction, and that in doing so, commented explicitly on the ideal status of women in the Jewish bourgeois home. In many ways, Franziska differs little from other spirited young fictional governesses of her era. She is a self-confident twenty-five-year old with a difficult past, an orphan who was once abandoned by a man she had hoped to marry. But she finds happiness almost as soon as she enters into the Anselm home, with its ample reading material, its simple elegance, its avoidance of unnecessary luxury, and its deep commitment to Judaism. Franziska bonds quickly with Anselm’s daughters, who welcome her as their “second mother,” and once she finally meets her elusive employer, she comes to see Dr. Anselm as a paragon of virtue, a physician who is deeply committed to his patients, to Judaism, and to extensive charity work in the community. Despite Franziska’s lack of beauty, Anselm comes to respect her deeply and to love her, finding in her a “new image of feminine dignity and kindness.”60 Like any good romance novel, moreover, “Die Gouvernante” has its share of conflict and

131

132

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

intrigue, provided largely by the passionate, hot-headed, and beautiful Auguste Hill, a mysterious woman who often barges in on Franziska and the children and makes numerous veiled and unveiled threats to the new governess. Much to Franziska’s dismay, Auguste turns out to be Anselm’s fiancée, and he is taken in by her beauty. Eventually, after a mutual friend comes to town to act as an intermediary, Anselm dissolves his engagement to Auguste, and he and Franziska get married. We are told at the conclusion of the novella that once the couple weds, Dr. and Mrs. Anselm inhabit a model of “domestic bliss and the most lovely happiness; the residents of this home get along perfectly, as they all have one common vision: to be good to one another and to make for happy times with each other. There hardly goes by an hour where Luise does not hang around her mother’s neck, then Anna stands at her side, holds Franziska’s hand, and looks tenderly in her eyes.”61 Like the other stories we have considered, “Die Gouvernante” creates a Jewish version of the bourgeois cult of domesticity, telling the tale of a virtuous governess who repairs a broken home, restores the family unit to its proper form, and in doing so secures the affections of the male head of household. Like other cultural fantasies about governesses—American readers will inevitably think of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music—”Die Gouvernante” blurs the lines between the work of paid domestics and the mission of motherhood, creating an imaginary world where the perfect governess is rewarded by becoming not just a “second mother” but the genuine article. There is more at stake here than fantasies of upward mobility. For just as the ideal Jewish governess can be promoted to the ideal Jewish mother, there are no doubts in the world envisioned by this novella that the role of women in the home is similar to that of servants: the ideal mother should act like the ideal governess. In her quest for love, romance, and complete self-fulfillment entirely within the domestic sphere, the governess Franziska serves thus as a perfect role model for all German-Jewish women who want to get married and live happily ever after—a woman who would have made an ideal wife for Robert Richardson, Jonathan Löwe, and many other protagonists of GermanJewish romance fiction.

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

Formstecher, Freytag, and the Quest for the Jewish Family Novel As we shall discover in the next section, when we consider the oeuvre of Rahel Meyer, one of the pioneering German-Jewish women novelists of her era, this tradition was not without its naysayers. Moving beyond Philippson’s model of the middlebrow Jewish romance, Meyer’s works routinely critiqued the cult of domesticity and envisioned models of self-fulfillment for women beyond that of love, romance, and marriage. Her early novel Zwei Schwestern (Two Sisters, 1853), in fact, offered a sustained critique of “woman’s destiny to submit to family life and loose oneself in it,” giving example after example of Jewish families suffering under the ideology that identified woman’s calling with the cultivation of domestic intimacy.62 But before we move on to consider critical voices, we need to devote some attention to the efforts of Philippson’s fellow rabbi, Salomon Formstecher (1808–1889), to create a great German-Jewish family novel, a novel that would raise German-Jewish romance fiction to the same level of respectability and critical acclaim as both historical fiction and Kompert’s ghetto tales. Known in the annals of the history of reform Judaism largely for his 1841 work, Die Religion des Geistes (The Religion of the Spirit), and his participation in the pivotal rabbinical conferences of the 1840s, Formstecher spent his professional life as the rabbi of the Jewish community in the central German city of Offenbach.63 Starting in the 1850s, however, he also began to publish fiction, including a fast-paced and wellconstructed Dickensian tale of intrigue in the Jüdisches Volksblatt about a young monk in the Russian Empire who discovers his Jewish origins, reconverts to Judaism, and has a heartfelt reunion with his long-lost father.64 Invoking the same language that he and Leopold Stein used in introducing Der Freitagabend in 1859, his 1863 preface to Buchenstein und Cohnberg cited the need to move away from theoretical writings to produce “popular literature” written in “pleasant forms.”65 As he made clear in his preface, however, Formstecher’s goal in writing Buchenstein und Cohnberg was not simply to preach by other means, to put his theology in the form of a novel. He sought to intervene directly in the literary politics of his day, to create a novel that would steer clear of the “caricatures” that “Christian writers have created, sometimes to praise

133

134

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

the Jews, sometimes to mock them.” Complaining that “contemporary novelists typically dedicate more care to describing Chinese or Malay ways of life than to representing the language and way of life of German Jews,” he introduced Buchenstein und Cohnberg as a pioneering example of a realist Jewish literature, a work that would deliver a full spectrum of “Jewish characters, from the freezing point of the most lowly form of egoism to the boiling point of the most noble self-denial.”66 Formstecher did not limit himself to these general comments in his preface complaining about the lack of authenticity of Jewish characters created by non-Jewish authors. Buchenstein und Cohnberg itself, we shall see, engaged directly with Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855), strategically rewriting a text that was the best-selling German novel of its era and historically one of the best-selling German novels of all time.67 It was through the process of reworking Freytag that Formstecher’s novel sought to introduce itself as the great novel of contemporary German-Jewish life, a piece of literature that deserved to be considered as more than a stock romance novel. When it comes to romance, we should note, Formstecher’s 299– page novel reads very much like a classic celebration of a Jewish marriage based in love between freely chosen partners. In the first chapter we meet Hanna Buchenstein, a virtuous eighteen-year-old girl whose mother died when she was two and whose father vanished without a trace soon thereafter. Hanna lives with her widower uncle and her paternal grandmother in a model of domestic Jewish bliss, and indeed, the novel opens during a cozy family Chanukah celebration. Yet from the beginning, we discover, this idyll of bourgeois domesticity is at risk of falling apart. Hanna is about to be married off to the evil villain Simon Cohnberg, a figure who thinks only about business and money and, like his mother Veilchen, lacks all feeling for higher things. The Buchensteins and Cohnbergs are business partners, and Hanna’s wellmeaning uncle is eager to cement the marriage for financial reasons, completely unaware that Hanna is already in love with his son and her cousin Rudolph. Rudolph, a character reminiscent of Eduard Meier in Lewald’s Jenny, is a virtuous young Heidelberg university student hoping to establish himself as a physician in town and a figure who—unlike Lewald’s Jewish characters—has deep commitments to Judaism. When the novel opens, Hanna is conflicted and resents being “sold off ” to a

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

“common soul” whom she despises. Ultimately, however, she manages to reconcile herself to her fate, keeping her love a secret while she prepares to sacrifice herself for the uncle who has done so much for her.68 The relationship between the Buchensteins and Cohnbergs is complicated further by the fact that Sophie Cohnberg, Simon’s virtuous sister and Hanna’s best friend, is deeply in love with Hanna’s brother Joseph, the aspiring reform rabbi who is also finishing up his education in Heidelberg and whose thoughts about Judaism in the modern world serve as a mouthpiece for Formstecher’s own views.69 And here as well, love faces numerous obstacles. Sophie’s affections for Joseph enrage both her mother, Veilchen, and her brother, Simon, who are dead set against the match and seek to marry her off to Simon’s evil clerk, a counterfeiter named Maximilian Leerhaus. Needless to say, the complex plot of this fast-paced novel is full of machinations and intrigue, largely engineered by Simon before his deceptive business practices cause the firm of Buchenstein and Cohnberg to declare bankruptcy and a warrant to be issued for his arrest. By the end of the novel, nevertheless, true love prevails, and both Sophie and Joseph and Hanna and Rudolph get married. As Sophie weds the newly established reform rabbi in town and Hanna finds love with a successful physician, two new Buchenstein households are created, signaling a clear move of this generation of Jews into the professional class and away from the commercial careers of their parents. In this sense, the values of romantic love and bourgeois domesticity triumph over both the shifty business practices of Simon Cohnberg and his mother Veilchen’s obsessions with money. Like in the novellas we considered in the previous section, moreover, romantic love here has the function of bringing together families across generations. Joseph, the reform rabbi, manages to find a place for his traditionally minded Talmudist father-in-law in the community life of the newly built synagogue in town. Rudolph, while working in a Jewish hospital in London (and trying to keep his distance from English missionaries), does not just encounter a penitent Simon on his deathbed asking for forgiveness. In an equally astonishing novelistic turn of fate, he finally reunites with his uncle and Hanna and Joseph’s long-lost father, bringing him into the fold as well. Clearly, these tales of romance have a broader message, and it is by organizing his novel around a conflict between the values of the Bu-

135

136

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

chensteins and the values of the Cohnbergs in this manner that Formstecher introduces Buchenstein und Cohnberg as a response to Freytag’s Soll und Haben. Freytag himself may not have harbored explicit antiJewish sentiments. Soll und Haben, however, hinged decisively on an opposition between the virtues and upstanding values of the German bourgeoisie and the shifty business practices of Jewish finance, and German Jews in the 1850s and 1860s were deeply suspicious of Freytag’s novel.70 Freytag, indeed, narrates the intellectual development of his protagonist, Anton Wohlfahrt, against the backdrop of any number of stereotypical Jewish characters. Anton is a clerk at the firm of T. O. Schröter who succeeds due to his hard work and honorable, virtuous character; the Jewish figures in the novel, in contrast, typically mine the world for profit and money by any means possible. Freytag frequently uses the young Jew Veitel Itzig as a figure whose complete lack of virtue and Yiddish-inflected speech help bring the virtues of his protagonist Anton into sharper focus, and the Jewish merchant Hirsch Ehrenthal for whom Veitel works does not just similarly speak a Yiddishized German. He also lacks honor and is obsessed with material and financial gain, immune to the suffering that his wheeling and dealing causes others. Buchenstein und Cohnberg is named after the firm originally shared by the Buchensteins and the Cohnbergs. Like Soll und Haben, it too is a novel that hinges on the opposition of virtuous, upstanding bourgeois values and shifty business practices, and Formstecher’s villains—Simon Cohnberg and his cronies, the traditionally minded Jews who see the world only in terms of profit and money—are more than a bit reminiscent of Ehrenthal and Veitel Itzig. Yet rather than perpetuating Freytag’s juxtaposition of solid German bourgeois values to Jewish finance, Formstecher resituates this problem in an entirely Jewish milieu. He creates a Jewish world full of virtuous heroes and heroines, using the template of Freytag’s novel to imagine the creation of a Jewish bourgeoisie that moves decisively beyond the world of commerce. Formstecher like Freytag creates a novel of professional development. Both Joseph Buchenstein’s attempt to establish himself as a reform rabbi and his cousin Rudolph’s endeavors to make a name for himself as a physician run parallel to Anton Wohlfahrt’s life story in Soll und Haben. In this regard, Buchenstein und Cohnberg clearly offers up

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

more inspiring models of Jewish success than that of the single positive Jewish character in Soll und Haben, the intellectual son of Hirsch Ehrenthal who, despite his impeccable German and his commitments to German values of Bildung, never manages to find a place for himself in the world and dies a young death. To be sure, in characters like Simon and Veilchen Cohnberg, Formstecher may be perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes, but he robs them of their universality by projecting them onto the orthodox. Formstecher thus rewrites and recasts Freytag’s best-seller, creating a version of Soll und Haben for a Jewish public that demonizes not Jews per se but only orthodox Jews, rendering reform Jews the virtuous heroes of Freytag’s bourgeois success story. And the fact that Formstecher does so by refusing to make use of any literary renditions of Yiddish—in Buchenstein und Cohnberg, all the Jews, heroes and villains alike, speak standard High German—only makes this even more an internal German-Jewish affair, a defense of reform, bourgeois Jews like the Buchensteins as the antithesis of the Cohnbergs. Modern Jews, reform Jews, bourgeois Jews, we learn, differ considerably from the orthodox Jews whose ostensibly fidelity to tradition in the novel goes hand in hand with their propensity for intrigue, money-laundering, and trafficking in counterfeit money. The problem with Freytag, then, is that he simply failed to differentiate among Jews and offer the rich tableau of Jewish characters that Formstecher does. But Freytag is not without value. After all, Soll und Haben clearly offers a model that a reform rabbi can adapt to tout Jewish virtues against Jewish vices much like Freytag set his virtuous hero in opposition to the powers of Jewish money. Marcus Lehmann, the Mainz rabbi who became German-Jewish orthodoxy’s leading publicist in the second half of the nineteenth century, charged Formstecher’s work with “misusing literature as propaganda for religious reform in Judaism.”71 But the orthodox were not the only ones to complain about Buchenstein und Cohnberg. Other readers felt that while the novel was obviously “enticing” and written in a “pleasant and fluent” style, it was nevertheless deeply compromised by its blackand-white depictions of modern-versus-traditional Jews. Noting that all traditional Jews in the novel were “monsters,” one reviewer asked rhetorically if Simon Cohnberg was supposed to “be a swindler because he is not completely alienated from faith.”72 A rabbinical candidate in Hun-

137

138

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

gary who was a proponent of reform commented similarly that that the novel was well conceived, “masterfully produced and executed,” and destined to “find many admirers,” but its author clearly did not hesitate to “glorify the progressive party [in Judaism] while using those individuals as spokesmen for the principles of the conservatives whose character in private life is marred by egoism, hypocrisy and deception. Apart from that, everything is painted in much too stark colors. As a result, the novel loses not a little of its claim to truth and exceeds the boundaries of what is natural.”73 For all these reviewers, Buchenstein und Cohnberg may have had great aspirations, but its literary value was severely compromised by its crass, melodramatic opposition between good and evil, by its formulaic use of character typing to denigrate its opponents in the orthodox camp. Soll und Haben, in other words, may not have been the best model of contemporary literature for Formstecher to engage with in his attempt to produce the great German-Jewish family novel. Even though it was never reprinted, Buchenstein und Cohnberg found its way into Jewish library collections in the nineteenth century, and it managed to remain on the literary radar for some time.74 Formstecher’s novel may never have come to dislodge historical fiction and ghetto tales from their central position in German-Jewish literary life, and it clearly did not receive the critical acclaim that Formstecher hoped for. Like many of the other texts discussed in this chapter, it is important less because of its success than because of its aspirations, because of the creative ways it sought to use both romance fiction and a critical engagement with the representations of Jews in contemporary literature to launch a literary genre that might aspire to play a crucial role in ensuring the next generation’s loyalty to Judaism. Like Philippson’s novellas in the Jüdisches Volksblatt, Buchenstein und Cohnberg actively promoted fantasies of Jewish romance as a force that would unite the German-Jewish community of the future. The villain Veilchen Cohnberg may have regarded “love, harmony of the heart, agreement between the opinions and desires of bride and groom” as “overexcited things for books, not for life,” but the lesson Buchenstein und Cohnberg imparted to its readers was that if given the proper Jewish inflection, such fantasies of romantic love were deeply realistic, a model to live by for the present, and a guarantor of Jewish community for the future.

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

Obviously, Buchenstein und Cohnberg never came to rival Soll und Haben on the German book market. But for the Jewish readers who picked up this fast-paced novel, it had the advantage of illuminating precisely those affinities between Judaism and bourgeois culture that best-selling novels like Soll und Haben made seem particularly precarious.

Rahel Meyer’s Critique of German-Jewish Romance Fiction The orthodox fictions of contemporary life we will be considering in the following chapter carried on the legacy of Philippson’s and Formstecher’s romantic tales, typically shifting allegiances around to vilify reform Jews for their materialism and empty religiosity while enshrining orthodox family life as the epitome of bourgeois culture. But the fact that this tradition of formulaic Jewish romances had a significant afterlife should not blind us to the critical voices that haunted this body of literature from the beginning. Bourgeois culture, as we noted before, did not just give women a new sense of their mission in the domestic sphere as wives, mothers, and transmitters of Jewish tradition. It also opened up a world in which Jewish women could find fulfillment in new public roles outside the home as well. It is in this context that we should consider the careers of pioneering writers of the period such as Fanny Neuda, Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, and Rahel Meyer, all of whom produced fiction designed for a Jewish audience. Neuda, known for Stunden der Andacht (Hours of Devotion, 1855), an enormously successful prayer book that had gone through more than twenty editions by the 1920s, was the widow of a rabbi in Moravia and the sister of a rabbi in Vienna and produced a volume of tales for adolescents in the 1870s.75 Guggenheim, the daughter of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the leader of German-Jewish orthodoxy, was the wife of a rabbi in Moravia and an extremely prolific author of fiction geared at an orthodox audience. We will consider Guggenheim’s work in detail in Chapter 4. Suffice it to say that neither Neuda nor Guggenheim cast a critical light on the happily-ever-after scenarios at the root of so much German-Jewish romance fiction. Meyer’s oeuvre, however, took a different approach, and it is her critique of the genre of the middlebrow

139

140

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

romance that we want to turn our attention to in this final section of the chapter. Unlike Neuda or Guggenheim, Meyer spent a considerable part of her life in the company of other writers.76 Born Rahel Weiss in Danzig (modern-day Gdansk) in 1806, she was married to a well-traveled amber merchant and lived a comfortable bourgeois life. She was active in charity work, helping to found a non-denominational school for the poor in Danzig where she herself taught, and she apparently began working on her first novel, Zwei Schwestern (Two Sisters, 1853), while helping her own children with their schoolwork. Meyer was certainly connected to circles of rabbis and Jewish educators. Her three-volume novel In Banden frei (Free in Bonds, 1865) was published by the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, as was an earlier work, Rahel (1859), and the Institut played a decisive role in launching her career as someone who would be remembered decades later “as one of the most superb modern Jewish writers.”77 But unlike Philippson or Formstecher, Meyer maintained deep social connections to other writers, and not just those who targeted a Jewish readership. Particularly after she moved to Vienna with her family in 1853, the same year Zwei Schwestern was published, she became involved with the contemporary cultural scene, entertaining literary celebrities such as Leopold Kompert, Salomon Mosenthal, Ludwig August Frankl, Hieronymus Lorm, and the celebrated dramatist Friedrich Hebbel in her home. In Danzig too, she had cultivated relationships with the region’s literary elite, whether in person or through correspondence. The distinguished Königsberg literary historian Alexander Jung treasured her as a friend whom he had never met but knew through her letters and her work, and he explained to Hebbel that her work was of the highest possible literary value. Jung read Zwei Schwestern in manuscript and shared his enthusiasm with Hebbel for this novel that was radically out of sync with the crude popular taste of the era with its preferences for “elegantly produced mediocrity.”78 Later, after Meyer moved to Berlin to live close to her married daughters, she crossed paths with writers such as Luise Mühlbach, the celebrated historical novelist, and Mühlbach’s husband Thomas Mundt, as well as Karl Gutzkow and others, including Jewish luminaries such as Leopold Zunz and Aron Bernstein. Published in 1853, the year Philippson launched the Jüdisches Volks-

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

blatt, Meyer’s Zwei Schwestern is important because it critiqued formulaic tales of romance and marriage at the same time as it aspired to be much more than a mass-produced piece of fiction. Famously hailed by Jung as “one of the most magnificent creations among recent novels,” Zwei Schwestern was a highly complex book in its formal structure.79 Meyer centered her novel on the life stories of two sisters in a bourgeois Jewish family, Betty and Lea Lichtenfeld, making extensive use of flashbacks, letters, inserted narratives, and private confessional writings to create a rich and multilayered tale of two sisters as they struggle with romance, marriage, intergenerational conflict, and ultimately death as well. In this way, Zwei Schwestern offers many different and often conflicting perspectives on the sufferings of its protagonists, and readers of Meyer’s 786–page work would have been hard pressed to reduce the novel to the type of simple celebration of the values of the GermanJewish bourgeoisie we have encountered in other works under study in this chapter. Indeed, Zwei Schwestern is hardly an uplifting read, and for nearly all the characters in this novel, the realm of bourgeois family life fails to provide the type of domestic anchor in the world that Philippson and Formstecher celebrated in their fictions. In the GermanJewish world portrayed by Meyer in her inaugural novel, no one lives happily ever after; finding the proper Jewish marriage partner proves to be eternally elusive; and neither Judaism nor the allures of bourgeois home life can solve what appears to be a more significant problem: the fact that Jews, in 1853, still lack equal rights. Given where Zwei Schwestern ends up, it is all the more telling that it starts off in a highly familiar register, with a vision of domestic bliss that would have been right at home in any number of the other tales we have discussed thus far. We learn at the beginning of the novel that the older generation of the Lichtenfeld family has suffered plenty of discrimination as Jews, and from an early age Betty and Lea’s father learned to find refuge from a world permeated by anti-Jewish prejudice in the “asylum of the simple family circle.” Settling down in the small provincial town of E., Herr Lichtenfeld became the archetypal bourgeois father and “lived only for his family”—in complete contrast to his brother who, unable to sublimate the inevitable frustrations of living as a Jew in German society, became obsessed with his honor, which he died defending in a duel against an antisemite. Living “in almost mo-

141

142

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

nastic isolation,” the Lichtenfeld family maintains social contact only with the few fellow Jewish families in the region but they thrive nonetheless, enjoying domestic bliss, with ample love between parents and children and between the sisters, and deeply felt filial piety on the part of the two daughters.80 From the late eighteenth century on, German women novelists cultivated a tradition of social and political critique in their fiction.81 Even in this opening scenario, Meyer casts a critical eye on the way Jews wholeheartedly embraced the bourgeois cult of domesticity. As similar as this initial description of household bliss may be to what we encountered in Philippson and Formstecher, Meyer clearly underscores the political circumstances under which Jews spent so much energy cultivating domestic forms of intimacy. The private world of the family may have its intrinsic draws, but it also figures as a compensation for German Jews’ lack of political equality. In this sense, the domestic bliss portrayed at the beginning of the novel is already cast as precarious, an effort by Jewish men to make bourgeois home life offset the freedoms they lack in the public realm. Soon enough, not surprisingly, trouble is brewing. The Lichtenfeld’s idyllic home life begins to unravel when Betty falls in love with and elopes with a virtuous Christian nobleman named Robert von Salm. Initially, Lea reacts to her sister’s actions by identifying entirely with her betrayed parents, and particularly her father. Outraged at Betty’s affront to the “rights of parents,” she feels that her sister’s conversion to Christianity is symptomatic of a troubling lack of familial loyalty; disturbed over the way the unpredictable forces of romance have torn apart her family, she pledges eternal filial piety.82 Like her parents, Lea is horrified that Betty would have fallen in love with a Christian, and in this sense, Zwei Schwestern differs little from the other literature we have discussed in this chapter. But after a hundred pages or so, the novel begins to approach matters in more differentiated terms, and as the narrator tells us, Lea begins to grasp that “everyone must live his or her own life and go down his or her own life’s path, despite familial love and family bonds.”83 Lea is driven to this position to some extent because her parents react to Betty’s departure with a desperate attempt to maintain the integrity of the family unit by instituting an “irrational” level of religious

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

observance into their once liberal Jewish home, painstakingly observing an “oppressive network of ceremonial law” that suffocates Lea and destroys her previous sense of a deep connection to God.84 Judaism in this setting hardly guarantees familial bliss. Rather, at least at this juncture in the novel, it becomes a force that both responds to and perpetuates domestic crisis. But it is not just her parents’ newfound fastidiousness in matters of Jewish ritual that leads her to an understanding of Betty’s motivations. Lea also gains empathy for her sister because she develops her own romantic fantasies, spurred on by her parents’ plan to marry her off to an uncle she barely remembers. In a fateful moment while vacationing with her family in the resort town of Töplitz, Lea meets, is taken in by, and even kisses a debonair man whom she mistakes for her uncle. Initially, this experience strengthens her resolve to resist the forces of romance and pledge even greater allegiance to her mother’s credo “that the blessing of the parents is the foundation for children’s marital happiness.”85 Yet once Lea meets her uncle, a crass merchant who cares only for business and is indifferent to art, music, and German literature, she perceives all too clearly the conflict between her ideals of a marriage based on love and friendship and the will of her parents: “The deep harmony between her and her parents that had been such a source of happiness for her was now gone forever.”86 Lea falls sick, hoping in vain that death will save her from the marriage to her philistine uncle. Lacking any other options, she ultimately gives in to the marriage, but her psychological turmoil hardly disappears. While maintaining a happy exterior that fools her parents, our young bride falls apart inside, suffering from insomnia and the “ills of an overexcited nervous system.”87 It is at this point in the novel that Lea spends hours pouring over the papers Betty prepared before a dying a young death, and Zwei Schwestern places these two sisters’ tragic quests for self-fulfillment within the contours of domestic life side by side in such a way as to introduce neither as a model. Dedicated to what she repeatedly calls the “gospel of love,” Betty struggled tremendously with her conversion and her betrayal of her parents, suffering from enormous guilt over actions she felt were dishonorable.88 Ultimately, she found peace only in death, leaving behind a mourning husband and young son who adored her—and a sister who eventually comes to understand her through

143

144

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

reading her papers. After several years, Lea manages to come to terms with her marriage and even develop some affection for her husband, but she never achieves anything resembling the domestic bliss of the young Jewish men and women one reads about in Formstecher’s and Philippson’s fiction. When pregnant with her second child, however, she falls in love with a brilliant young Jewish physician named Theodor who shares her passion for the liberal politics of Gabriel Riesser, the leading mid-nineteenth-century Jewish advocate for Jewish emancipation. Like Lea, Theodor wants Jews to be emancipated as Jews and he too is a fierce opponent of conversion. When he leaves Germany for a medical professorship in Switzerland that he can accept openly as a Jew, he pleads desperately for Lea to abandon her husband and accompany him. Bound by loyalty, Lea stays behind. Decades later, however, after her husband passes away and she is herself near death, Theodor and Lea finally pledge their eternal love to each other. Once Lea like her sister finds peace only in death, the novel concludes with Lea’s children coming of age in a difficult world, telling the tale of a generation who, in the aftermath of the failed 1848 revolution, found themselves “exhausted by politics, hoping to recuperate in the quiet circle of the family.”89 The conclusion of Zwei Schwestern is important because it never resolves the major issue at stake, namely, how a retreat into bourgeois family life ultimately provides a poor compensation for Jews living in a world that refuses them equal rights. In Zwei Schwestern, maintaining a happy home life seems particularly difficult for Jewish families, and for Jewish women such as Lea and Betty Lichtenfeld, the realities of domestic life hardly sit well with the cult of domesticity. Zwei Schwestern thus explicitly critiques the lack of freedom of Jewish men and women in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, offering a commentary on the sugar-coated visions of domesticity celebrated in so much contemporary Jewish romance fiction. Rather than producing a novel singing the virtues of the German-Jewish middle class, Meyer’s Zwei Schwestern reflects on the complex forces shaping Jewish domestic life, representing the contemporary Jewish world as anything but a vibrant place where the glories of familial intimacy and the gospel of love flourish. Meyer casts domestic life here as a realm of noble suffering that is both political and personal at once, the site of a bourgeois tragedy that is infinitely more complex and subtle than what contemporary readers encountered

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

in Formstecher or Philippson. Written when Meyer was still in Danzig, Zwei Schwestern pays little attention to issues of religious reform. Much like the fiction Lewald was publishing a decade earlier, it tends to render Jewish ritual a thing of the past and present Jewish solidarity largely as a question of honor. But soon after publishing Zwei Schwestern, Meyer moved into different terrain, giving portraits of Jewish women much more fiercely committed to the substance of Jewish tradition and to reconciling Judaism and modernity. It is in this context that we need to consider Rahel (1859), her 224–page biographical novella about the life and times of the darling of the mid-nineteenth-century French theater, Elisabeth Rachel Félix. Known often simply as Rachel, Félix was a controversial figure, famous not just for her performances of tragic figures and the role she played in bringing classical French tragedy back into vogue but for her private life as well. Before dying at the age of thirty-seven in 1858, she had well-known affairs with luminaries such as Napoleon I’s son, Alexandre Joseph Count Colonna-Walewski (with whom she had a son, in 1844), and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (who later became Napoleon III).90 Indeed, a Jewish newspaper in France took the occasion of her death to comment that “all that we can say of Mlle Rachel is, that to her other immoralities she has not added that of apostasy.”91 Published just one year after Rachel’s death, Meyer’s Rahel presented its German-Jewish readership a strikingly different image of the famous actress. In Meyer’s account, like in many others, Rachel Félix created a “revolution” in the French theater, which she single-handedly “elevated to a true temple of art, whose most dignified priestess she was.”92 Her book, however, relays next to nothing of the scandals surrounding Rachel’s personal life. The Rachel Félix we are introduced to here, instead, is a paragon of virtue, modesty, and morality.93 To be sure, Meyer makes clear that for many contemporaries she represented the paradigmatic “beautiful Jewess.”94 Her debut on stage and her entry into the world of high society are important, however, because they coincided with a renewed commitment to Judaism. Indeed, the biography concludes with an exchange between Rachel and her father where Rachel swears that she will never abandon the faith of her forefathers. Coming at the end of a final chapter entitled “Society,” which explores the various forms of temptation, apostasy, and moral disintegration that the “false Gods” of

145

146

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

fame and glory threatened to bring about for Rachel, this conclusion to the biography gives the sense that fidelity to her family and to Judaism provided Rachel the moral anchor she needed to get through life and be such a successful artist. After Rachel pledges to her father to die a Jewess, Meyer includes two and a half lines of dashes, a clear reference to what every reader would have known about Rachel’s libertine lifestyle. She then concludes the biographical sketch with a statement that claims Rachel as a thoroughly Jewish artist: “Rachel kept her oath. She died on January 4, 1858 in Cannes, true to her faith.”95 Nine years after Rahel was published, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was still recommending Meyer’s biography as an antidote to dominant characterizations of Rachel as driven by insane ambition.96 Thanks to its prominent place in the list of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur and its republication in 1912 in the Jüdische Universal-Bibliothek, yet another prominent Jewish book series, Meyer’s Rahel constructed a heroic vision of Rachel that served the needs of its German-Jewish readers for many years to come. Yet Meyer did more than simply make Rachel’s life story drive home the message that commitments to the world of tragedy and high culture were perfectly compatible with Judaism. Her version of the renowned French actress’s life story also served to critique the bourgeois cult of domesticity that Philippson’s and Formstecher’s fiction was encouraging its readers to embrace so wholeheartedly. Like Zwei Schwestern, Meyer’s Rahel also commented on the limited opportunities that bourgeois life provided for Jewish women, and it did so through a love story between Rachel and one of her fellow French Jews. Not surprisingly given who her readers were, Meyer begins her biography with lengthy descriptions of Rachel’s early childhood as the daughter of an itinerant peddler and beggar that read in many ways as if they were lifted directly out of Kompert’s ghetto tales. The centerpiece of her novella, however, is the love story between Rachel and a Jewish man named Leo who teaches her to read and advises her on her career but then wants to force her into a conventional marriage that would have left no room for her brilliant career on stage. Leo and Rachel love each other deeply, and tellingly, this is the only episode of romance that makes its way into Meyer’s novella. Yet for all his support of Rachel, Leo never finds himself able to see in her “inclination for art” anything

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

more than the “desire to escape from limiting, simple duties.” Much to Rachel’s chagrin, he “hates everything that would take a woman out of the limited sphere of the home,” and like the uncle whom Lea Lichtenfeld was forced to marry in Zwei Schwestern, Leo lacks all true “appreciation of art and of her.”97 When Leo finally beseeches her to “turn around and return to the narrow circle of family . . . where you find love, innocence, trust, and devotion,” Meyer’s heroine refuses dramatically. She responds that while she clearly loves him and her family deeply, she nevertheless loves her freedom and her art much more.98 This lengthy episode with Leo—a feature of this novella that sets it apart from many other, sensationalist recountings of Rachel’s life— serves as the turning point in Meyer’s account of her protagonist’s development. Rather than rehearsing familiar stories about Rachel’s amorous liaisons, Meyer creates a portrait of the artist as a young Jewish woman that foregrounds Rachel’s explicit rejection of both bourgeois ideals of romance and domestic life. Immediately after Rachel spurns Leo’s proposal of marriage, Leo leaves France for America and dies tragically in a shipwreck off the coast of New York City. Rachel subsequently suffers from tremendous guilt, feeling that she is directly responsible for his death. This pain and suffering, however, both motivate her to dedicate herself fully to her art and enable her to find redemption and distinction through it: “Yes, she thought, the only way to truly conquer the deep silent pain over Leo’s death and find atonement for it would be to be ordained as a priestess of art.”99 Cast in this light, her brilliant success on the French stage marks an effective mode of healing for Rachel, and it offers up a clear alternative to the lures of home life, sketching out a trajectory of self-fulfillment that is far more inspiring than the tragic life stories of Betty and Lea Lichtenfeld. Rachel may play tragedies on the French stage, but in life she triumphs, becoming a Jewish heroine through whom Meyer’s female readers might live vicariously. Meyer does not just offer a sanitized version of the life of Rachel Félix. She reclaims the French tragic actress as a source of inspiration for her Jewish readers, giving an example of a Jewish woman’s life of fame and glory lived out in the public realm, far beyond the domestic world to which Formstecher and Philippson directed the female readers of their romances to confine their desires. In her final novel, In Banden frei (Free in Bonds, 1865), Meyer sought

147

148

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

a midpoint between the extremes of Rahel and Zwei Schwestern, telling the tale of an extraordinary young woman named Pauline Leves who seeks to find her way through the world, striving for autonomy, intellectual development, and fidelity to Judaism at the same time as she navigates the world of love and romance. Contemporary reviewers duly noted that In Banden frei was anything but formulaic. An enthusiastic early review in the Kölnische Zeitung, one of the era’s most prominent liberal daily newspapers, observed that Meyer made little effort to cater to the “taste of people who frequent lending libraries.” The reviewer warned readers eager for “action, lively suspense or anxious embroilment in drastic and unbelievable situations” that they would be put off by Meyer’s latest novel, which was a “portrait of a soul in a rich culturalhistorical frame” that offered a “penetrating view into the most hidden stirrings of the soul.”100 Similarly praising the aesthetic distinction of In Banden frei, a review in a Jewish journal celebrated the novel for its exemplary portrayal of a “prototype” of a Jewish woman striving for selfrealization within the Jewish world. In an age in which Jewish women in literature typically were driven by a “lust for love” that inevitably landed them in the arms of Christian suitors, Meyer dared to create in Pauline Leves an exemplar of a Jewish woman marked by a different sort of desire, the “drive for intellectual education.”101 As we mentioned earlier, Meyer ends In Banden frei with marriage, but ultimately this novel is a Bildungsroman concerned with Pauline’s intellectual and social development, and Meyer spends precious little of her 742 pages indulging in the type of fantasies of love and romance propagated by the popular literature of the period. Indeed, the moment at the end of the novel’s third and final volume when Pauline meets up with a long-lost uncle, unexpectedly falls in love, and gets married figures less as the final goal of her drive for self-fulfillment than as an appropriate coda to a long and difficult process of self-education and finding her way in the world. In Banden frei clearly idealizes a model of marriage based in love and mutual affection and respect (and while doing so, to be sure, it also concedes a penchant for a level of Jewish inbreeding that we have encountered in other texts as well).102 But Meyer presents marriage as part of a more general celebration of Pauline’s unflinching quest for autonomy. In this sense, this novel differs considerably from nearly all the other fictional tales we have considered in this

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

chapter. Meyer creates a Bildungsroman that relegates romance to the sidelines of a Jewish woman’s journey of intellectual growth and maturation, and in this sense, it serves as a perfect final piece of literature for us to discuss in this chapter. Meyer conceived her novel in part as a tribute to her childhood friend Lina Davidson, who many contemporaries felt had a nature similar to that of the brilliant salonière Rahel Levin Varnhagen.103 Readers of In Banden frei at the time might not have known about the connection to Davidson, but they would have sensed the extent to which Rahel Varnhagen provided Meyer a crucial model of paths that Jewish women should not travel. A celebrity in her day, and immortalized after her death by her husband, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, in Rahel. Ein Buch des Andenkens (Rahel: A Book of Memory, 1835), Rahel Varnhagen converted to Christianity before her marriage.104 Indeed, already in Zwei Schwestern, Meyer spoke about Varnhagen as one of numerous Jewish women from an earlier generation who “made the mistake of thinking Christianity was the path toward freedom.”105 In In Banden frei, which starts off in and around Danzig in the early nineteenth century, moves in its second book to “the Czar’s capital,” St. Petersburg, and deals in its third book with “the metropolis of the intelligentsia,” i.e., Berlin, Varnhagen makes an extended cameo appearance. Singling the celebrated salonière out for criticism, Meyer uses Varnhagen’s life story as a backdrop for appreciating Pauline’s own achievements of finding freedom, as the title of the novel indicates, not outside of Judaism but within its bonds.106 The fact that Meyer published In Banden frei under the pen name “Rahel,” identifying herself as the author of her previous, anonymously published works, drove home this connection to the most famous German Rahel of the nineteenth century. This Rahel’s In Banden frei provided a life story of a Jewish woman that served explicitly as a corrective to Rahel Varnhagen, a Bildungsroman that like her biographical novella Rahel pursued the quest for a fulfilled life lived within the boundaries of Jewish tradition. As a young girl, we are told, Pauline had a questioning and critical nature and struggled intensely with traditional forms of Jewish ritual that she felt to be empty and meaningless. As she matured, however, she came to develop a deep sense of Jewish religiosity. By the time her brother’s decision to convert to Christianity to marry a Christian

149

150

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

woman causes her widowed mother to fall sick and die, she has already become a committed Jewess, taking pride in the fact that while Judaism may prescribe ceremonial laws it nevertheless gives complete freedom to the spirit.107 With nowhere else to turn at this point, Pauline leaves the sand dunes of her beloved native region to see whether she might find it tolerable to live with her brother and new sister-in-law in St. Petersburg, the city where he is attempting to establish a medical practice. Jews are forbidden from residing in St. Petersburg, and while there, Pauline becomes a victim of the attempts of her sister-in-law— a scheming, manipulative, and moody woman prone to tantrums—to convert her to Christianity. Needless to say, both her struggles with her sister-in-law’s attempt to save her soul and her brother’s machinations to marry her off to any number of non-Jewish men only fortify her Jewish pride. Escaping from a no-win situation, she ends up with distant relatives in Berlin. In the “metropolis of the intelligentsia” in the early 1830s, Pauline finally encounters models of Judaism as a living tradition that she can embrace wholeheartedly. She strikes up a close friendship with a doctor and his wife, an elderly couple who regard their Judaism with pride as a “gift of fate” and who feel that their deep commitments to Jewish tradition support and reinforce their equally deep investments in modern secular culture.108 It is through these friends that Pauline encounters Rahel Varnhagen. Running into an elderly Rahel at a salon, Pauline naively asks who the “old Jewess” is, and it is at this point that her new friends give her a crash course in the grand Jewish salonières of an earlier era. In the world Pauline travels in, Rahel’s letters and aphorisms are published in Berlin newspapers, and she soon develops an intense admiration for Rahel’s wit and independence of spirit. But just as quickly she comes to distance herself from her alter ego. Her new friends point out to her that when Rahel was young, intelligent Jewish women were given few positive models of religiosity and no models of reconciling tradition and modernity; this is, of course, a situation Pauline knows only all too well from her own childhood.109 Jewish women today, we are told, have a clear and purified concept of Judaism at their disposal, and as a result they are in a much better position to value their religion than the generation of their mothers. Unlike Pauline, her friends are quick to point out, Rahel and her fellow salonières “gave up their faith with unprec-

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

edented thoughtlessness, embracing a captivating wit and empty slogans instead. All they cared about was justifying the free development of their personality, and they took no one else into consideration.”110 To be sure, the doctor’s wife points out, perhaps they would not have taken this step if the idea of Judaism had already been purified and made popular at that time. . . . At the time, Judaism appeared to all those who did not consider it deeply to symbolize shame, slavery and a lack of inner and outer freedom. With these sisters the desire for brilliance and for a high position in society was reinforced by an aesthetic sense that found no nourishment in the circles to which they belonged by birth. As a result they sacrificed the essence of religion for mere form.111

Whatever level of sympathy it might secure for the salonières by trying to understand them in their historical context, In Banden frei ultimately discredits these women as apostates looking for superficial and simplistic forms of freedom. In this sense, of course, Meyer’s novel differs little from other books published by the Institut such as Heinrich Graetz’s monumental multivolume Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews, 1853–1870). In a famous passage directed at Varnhagen and her peers, Graetz spoke of the “sinful and morally depraved” Jewish women of the period whose eventual conversion to Christianity did their fellow Jews a great service.112 For Meyer, however, these Jews did not just abandon Judaism: Varnhagen, the doctor’s wife points out, “was not ashamed to be ashamed publicly that she was a Jewess.”113 Against this backdrop, Pauline’s life story clearly offers an alternative, and not simply because she manages to find freedom without “liberating” herself from the bonds of Jewish tradition. In the Berlin segment of In Banden frei, accordingly, Meyer has her heroine prove herself and her ability to inspire Jewish solidarity through the friendship she develops with her cousin Lydie, a young woman consumed by a “fatal attraction for everything noble” whose life story runs the risk of following in Rahel Varnhagen’s footsteps.114 Indeed, the denouement of this less-thanaction-packed novel, to the extent that it has one, hinges on Pauline saving Lydie from conversion to Christianity by giving her a model of commitment to Judaism. Within the pages of In Banden frei Pauline does not just develop into a mature Jewish woman able to reconcile Judaism and modernity; she inspires others to do so as well.

151

152

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

Unlike her good friends, the doctor and his wife, Pauline’s Berlin relatives have yet to develop a proper relationship to Judaism. Obsessed with passing as non-Jews in public, they remove from the entryway of their home the portrait of Lydie’s traditional and very Jewish looking grandmother, and they have failed to give Lydie a proper Jewish education. While harboring the picture of the beloved maternal ancestor in her room, Pauline seeks to preside over her legacy. Lydie’s parents are eager to marry her off to an appropriate (Jewish) partner, and Lydie despises the reduction of marriage to a financial transaction and resents being an object of speculation on the marriage market. Pauline has nothing but sympathy. In the context of the novel, however, Lydie’s response—to seek romance in the arms of a two-timing count—appears childish and naïve, and soon enough, Lydie realizes she has been betrayed by her count, develops typhus, and almost dies. It is under Pauline’s tutelage that Lydie recovers both physically and psychologically. Her parents, smart enough to see their daughter’s actions as a Jewish wake-up call, recommit to Jewish tradition and symbolically restore the picture of the grandmother to its proper place in the family foyer. And most importantly, we are told, Pauline and Lydie become the best of friends during this process, finding self-fulfillment in their sisterly relationship with each other. Much like Zwei Schwestern, In Banden frei celebrates bonds between women. Despite her parents’ best efforts to set her up with a wealthy Jewish banker, Lydie neither finds love nor marries at the end of the novel. But she, like Pauline, finds a true friend, and it is in many ways the solidification of this friendship between two Jewish women that marks the final goal of the novel. Pauline marries, to be sure, but she does so only once she has found her own way through the world and taken on an active role through her friendship with her cousin Lydie, only once she has herself taken steps to promote those norms of commitment to Judaism that her alter ego Rahel Varnhagen rejected with “unprecedented thoughtlessness.” Often considered the epitome of a German literary form dedicated to idealism and high culture, the Bildungsroman was never a dominant genre of fiction in the nineteenth century, but it was one that was particularly appealing to literary elites.115 For Rahel Meyer, not surprisingly, adapting this genre to chart the development of a Jewish woman committed to Judaism involved not just rejecting the formulaic closure of

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

the romance novel but also specifically detailing her protagonist’s own aesthetic education, the development of her own taste for high culture. From an early age, Meyer’s alternative to Rahel Varnhagen was both a voracious reader of literature and a highly selective one. Even as a child, she developed a natural distaste for popular novels about knights and ladies and Heinrich Clauren’s best-selling popular romances that her aunt enjoyed so much.116 Introduced by a university friend of her brother to the “German and foreign classics,” she displays an incredible depth in her aesthetic response to Shakespeare, Tasso, and Greek tragedy, rejecting “ordinary entertainment literature” for its superficiality and hackneyed sentimentalism. To be sure, Pauline reads Clauren, La Fontaine, and Kotzebue when she has access to no other reading material—and growing up in rural areas outside of Danzig she often has slim pickings—but she engages with these texts critically, preferring works like Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, which she feels give her soul nourishment.117 And later in life, in St. Petersburg and Berlin, she discovers not just Heinrich Heine but a vibrant world of theater and opera that fulfills her spiritual needs. In Pauline’s case, Judaism and high culture come to exist side by side in harmony, and it is hardly surprising that reviewers of the novel emphasized its highbrow ambitions. As the most substantial single piece of fiction published by the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, Meyer’s In Banden frei strove to move far beyond the strictures of the middlebrow romance, telling the tale of a female heroine who develops into an inspiring model of a Jewish woman committed to both Judaism and high culture—a woman who achieves her autonomy and finds self-determination on her own, before finding the proper Jewish mate. The female Jewish Bildungsroman was hardly a major genre in German-Jewish literature; indeed, In Banden frei may be the only text published in the nineteenth century that even fits this designation. But the fact that this novel promoted and disseminated by the leading Jewish publication society of the period offered such a sustained and farreaching critique of the conventions of middlebrow romance should alert us to the dynamic nature of German-Jewish literary culture of the nineteenth century. Clearly, as the countless examples have driven home, literary elites strategically put popular romance to work in the

153

154

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

interests of promoting Jewish continuity and helping to enshrine a distinctly Jewish version of the bourgeois cult of domesticity. But they did so in such a way as to open up a space for alternative voices as well, for claims that being a faithful daughter of Israel involved much more than finding fulfillment in romance, marriage, and motherhood. Despite its positive reception in the 1860s, In Banden frei may never have become the same type of classic of German-Jewish literature as the texts we considered in the preceding two chapters. Those readers willing to work their way through Meyer’s 742–page magnum opus nevertheless found themselves presented with a sustained critique of the extent to which the entrenchment of the bourgeois cult of domesticity among Jews was predicated on a particularly formulaic brand of middlebrow culture. And as this Rahel’s sustained efforts to set up both her protagonists and her own persona as an author as authentically Jewish alternatives to Rahel Varnhagen made clear, this was a critique of the Jewish middlebrow romance issued in the name of Judaism, a critique that was as fiercely committed to Jewish continuity as anything published by Philippson or Formstecher.

The Virtues of Marrying In In 1865, when Meyer published In Banden frei, orthodox Jewish belles lettres was just getting off the ground, and as we shall see in the following chapter, the type of sustained critique of bourgeois ideas of romance, marriage, and domesticity that we found in Meyer’s three major works left no resonance in this camp. But it is not just among the orthodox minority that it is difficult to pinpoint direct evidence of the impact of Meyer’s work in any sort of broad manner. Books published by the Institut like Rahel and In Banden frei had a certain degree of longevity, and in 1899, the Breslau-based journalist Regina Neisser, writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, was still celebrating Meyer “as one of the most superb modern Jewish writers.”118 At the same time, however, most enthusiasts of German-Jewish belles lettres would have found Meyer’s slow-moving Bildungsroman eclipsed by tales such as “Die Gegensätze,” “Speicher, Bude und Salon,” “Die Begegnung” and “Die Gouvernante,” all of which were reprinted in Philippson’s Saron

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

and thus much more readily available in Jewish homes, schools, and lending libraries. Recently, Florian Krobb has spoken of a tradition of the German-Jewish family novel that extends from Rahel Meyer to Georg Herrmann and Auguste Hauschner in the early twentieth century.119 Yet the extent to which later authors engaged Meyer’s work directly remains open to debate. As important as it is to recognize moments of resistance and critique in nineteenth-century GermanJewish domestic fiction, we should also be careful not to overestimate the impact that these critical voices may have had. In this context, it makes sense to conclude by focusing on a characteristic that nearly all the literature we have examined in this chapter shares, regardless of its support for or critique of the bourgeois cult of domesticity. Texts as disparate as Buchenstein und Cohnberg and In Banden frei did far more than create worlds in which Jews fell in love and found eternal domestic bliss with other Jews. They also provided numerous examples of marriages between close relatives. Pauline Leves marries her maternal uncle, as does Lea Lichtenfeld. Hanna Buchenstein finds true love in the arms of her first cousin Rudolph at the same time as her best friend Sophie Cohnberg marries Hanna’s brother Joseph. To some extent, of course, these matches may simply reflect social reality. According to German civil law at the time, it was not illegal for uncles and nieces (or aunts and nephews) to marry, and unlike today, marriage between first cousins was hardly unusual in nineteenth-century Germany. We know from the work of Marion Kaplan, moreover, that particularly in rural areas and small towns, German Jews in the late nineteenth century married relatives at a much higher rate than non-Jews.120 We should thus hardly be surprised to encounter such couplings in fiction that was committed to the same ideals of endogamy that made German-Jewish parents look on their nieces and nephews as such attractive future mates for their children. Yet there is more at stake here than acknowledging a crucial historical context for a genre of literature that often celebrates Jewish family through romance between family members. As we have noted before, Jews in the nineteenth century—like other middle-class Germans— rarely married for love in the same way that characters in novels pursued romance, and it is against this backdrop that we should consider what the fantasies of love and romance promulgated by German-Jewish

155

156

Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance

writers sought to do for their readers. German-Jewish romance fiction imagined a world where Jews typically found self-fulfillment through fantasies of romantic love that were at once fantasies of being part of a larger Jewish community. Falling in love meant falling in love with one’s future mate, with one’s new extended family, and with Judaism all at the same time. In this context, needless to say, dark handsome strangers, exotic figures from unknown places, erotic fantasies about foreigners—all these stock tricks of the romance novel had no role to play in German-Jewish domestic fiction. As the writers we have considered knew only all too well, romance along these lines was key to the way Jews were so often represented—and Jewish continuity undermined—in fiction by non-Jews. Jewish writers responded to this literature by creating a counter-tradition of Jewish romance that, rather than celebrating escapist fantasies of finding true love with an exotic stranger, idealized finding love and romance with someone considerably closer to home, if not someone already living under the same roof. In this framework, marrying one’s uncle or first cousin was hardly an aberration. It embodied precisely those ideals of marrying in that German-Jewish romance fiction sought to promote. In a roundabout way, one’s cousin was the ideal mate, and enshrining these sorts of relationships in fiction had the advantage of strategically blurring the distinctions between romantic love, familial affection, and commitments to Judaism itself, making it all the easier for Jews in arranged marriages to feel the proper way about their spouse. Clearly, this strategy of seeking love so close to home may not have led to the type of suspenseful pageturners that our reader from Lemberg was so desperate for Philippson to produce. But it did create a different type of popular literature, one that could help Jews imagine their place in precisely that type of Jewish community that Philippson, Formstecher, and Meyer were so eager to see flourish in the future.

Fo u r  Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of

Modern Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy and the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel In an 1898 review article published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Ludwig Geiger took the publication of two “Jewish tales” as an occasion for a polemical intervention in the German-Jewish literary politics of his day. Geiger, a distinguished scholar of German literature and the son of Abraham Geiger, the preeminent leader of the reform movement at mid century, was a professor extraordinarius in Berlin and the inaugural editor of the Goethe Jahrbuch (Goethe Yearbook). Like many other late nineteenth-century intellectual elites wedded to high culture, he was no fan of historical fiction, and both the works he reviewed—Wilhelm Jensen’s Die Juden zu Köln (The Jews of Cologne, 1867, 1897) and Jakob Wassermann’s Die Juden von Zirndorf (The Jews of Zirndorf, 1897)—had the misfortune, he noted, of “being half or entirely historical.”1 In dismissing historical fiction in this manner, Geiger was rejecting what had been the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums’s preferred genre of German-Jewish literature since its founding in 1837. Writing with rhetorical flair, he also threw in an attack on the ghetto tale, characterizing recent ghetto fiction as marked by an “unfortunate (but not completely inexplicable) predilection for depicting circumstances outside Germany.”2 With his predecessors and contemporaries cleared away in this manner, the stage was set for Geiger’s own vision of what German-Jewish literature should be all about: To me it is inexplicable that Jewish novelists who live in Germany, as soon as they turn their gaze to Jewish matters, seem to have neither

157

158

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

the need nor even the inclination to represent the German-Jewish circumstances of the present. . . .  Should our Jewish writers not be inclined to give us, for once, a German-Jewish novel? One would think that our era called for this with urgency. Antisemitism and Zionism, enthusiasm for German culture and the rejection of allegedly German demands and claims—the entire yearning desire to unite completely with that people to whom we have belonged through culture and ethos for centuries, and then, alongside this, the reverent force that pulls some of us to the Orient and others to the ancient customs—what wonderful material that would give a poet! And what conflicts, if love were to intervene here? But where is the author who would deal with all this, and perhaps, if there were such an author, who would read this work?3

With this essay, Geiger launched what became an ongoing concern of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in the years before and after he assumed the editorship in 1909: the quest for the great GermanJewish novel, the attempt to find the literary work that would capture the complexities of the “German-Jewish circumstances of the present” in that distinctly modern form which had achieved such prominence in the nineteenth century. It was in this context that the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums paid so much attention not just to Wassermann’s Die Juden von Zirndorf but to other prominent fin-de-siècle novels such as Ludwig Jacobowski’s Werther der Jude (Werther the Jew, 1892), Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (Old New Land, 1902), Georg Hermann’s Jettchen Gebert (1906), Auguste Hauschner’s Die Familie Lowositz (The Lowositz Family, 1908), and Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie (The Road into the Open, 1908). Inevitably, Geiger and others writing in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums found that none of these texts lived up to the grand plans that Geiger articulated.4 In the context of this chapter, Geiger’s call to his contemporaries to write the great German-Jewish novel is important less because of what he says than because of what he systematically ignores. Writing in the liberal Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums at the end of the nineteenth century, Geiger had no need to integrate into his discussion the extent to which one subgroup within German Jewry had already made the novel of contemporary Jewish life a prominent and well-respected staple of its literary production. Starting with Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger’s Der

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

treue Zionswächter (The Faithful Guardian of Zion) in 1845, orthodox newspapers emerged as a challenge to the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums’s claims to be a “non-partisan organ for all Jewish interests”—and as part of a more general backlash against the rabbinic conferences of the 1840s in which Geiger’s father had played such a prominent role.5 Der treue Zionswächter published little fiction before it closed down in 1854,6 and the same was true, initially, for Jeschurun, the monthly journal that Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the towering figure in GermanJewish orthodoxy, inaugurated in 1854. After some initial public debate about Jewish belles lettres in the late 1850s, however, Hirsch’s journal began publishing serialized fiction in 1863, restricting itself almost exclusively to the work of Sara Hirsch Guggenheim, Hirsch’s daughter and the wife of an orthodox rabbi in Moravia. Guggenheim, whose work in Jeschurun appeared under the pseudonym “S,” was a prolific writer of multigenerational family sagas charting the struggles of pious Jewish women and men to square their commitment to orthodoxy with the demands of modern life.7 In her tales, which drew heavily on the conventions of contemporary realist fiction and dealt self-consciously with “German-Jewish circumstances of the present,” orthodox Jews emerge as triumphant heroes in the modern world, creating happy bourgeois homes marked by the nineteenth century’s characteristic cult of domesticity. Those Jews who desecrate the Sabbath, ignore dietary laws, or turn their back on tradition, on the other hand, typically end up leading lives devoid of moral value or descending into depravity and financial ruin. In turning her eyes to the German-Jewish present in this manner, Guggenheim made ample use of the fast-paced plots, cliffhangers, and sentimental family drama so typical of the serialized fiction of the era, serving up a distinctly orthodox variation on what Peter Brooks has characterized as the “polarization of good and evil” constitutive of the ethical universe of nineteenth-century melodrama.8 By 1864–1865, the serialized novels Guggenheim produced in this vein regularly took up close to a quarter of the entire year’s pages of Jeschurun, and once established, this pattern continued. When Hirsch’s journal ceased publication in 1869, it had already found an able successor in Der Israelit, the weekly newspaper that Marcus Lehmann, the rabbi of the orthodox community in Mainz, founded in 1860 as a “cen-

159

160

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

tral organ for orthodox Jewry” and that continued publication until it was shut down by the Nazis in 1938.9 In the 1850s, before committing himself to the rabbinate, Lehmann had flirted with the idea of becoming a writer.10 Not surprisingly, he found in Hirsch’s project of disseminating narrative fiction in keeping with the values of modern orthodoxy an enticing model to follow. Starting in 1867, he too began to deliver large doses of serialized fiction to his readers. He published primarily his own work but eventually also that of others, including Guggenheim, who by the late 1870s had carved out a niche for herself using the pen name Friedrich Rott. By the time Lehmann died in 1890, Der Israelit had established itself as a major presence in German-Jewish life, becoming the newspaper with the largest advertising section of any Jewish publication.11 Lehmann’s paper had also printed more than a hundred original novels and novellas, many of which were reissued as free gifts to subscribers and reissued in book form well into the twentieth century. Many of the works published in Der Israelit were ghetto tales, and some, including a number of Lehmann’s most enduring texts, were pieces of historical fiction. Nevertheless, close to half of all the fictional works in Der Israelit and a large portion of Lehmann’s own oeuvre consisted of novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life much like those that had appeared in Jeschurun in the 1860s.12 Like Guggenheim, Lehmann wrote narratives characterized by gripping plots, lost loves, and sentimental melodrama. He gave his works an even more explicit stamp of rabbinic approval, often casting orthodox rabbis as first-person narrators and sometimes even as detectives. Indeed, as recently as 2004, a staff writer for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reviewing an all-female musical adaptation of a Lehmann novel at a local Chabad high school introduced Lehmann to her readers as the “John Grisham of the Orthodox world.”13 The work adapted for the musical stage appears to have been Lehmann’s novel Säen und Ernten (To Sow and to Reap), which was serialized in Der Israelit in 1870, reissued in book form as a free gift for subscribers in the 1880s, and rendered into English in 1981.14 A typical example of Lehmann’s novels of contemporary Jewish life, Säen und Ernten tells the story of Wilhelm Wolfssohn, a wealthy banker in the fictional town of “B” who after being exposed to reform in his early years in Hamburg becomes

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

the worst sort of assimilationist. After he helps fund the construction of the local railway, Wolfssohn is ennobled and becomes von Wolfseck. He eventually turns his back on his faith, his family, and the entire Jewish community, abandoning his pious wife and the mother of his children so that he can marry a countess. Ultimately, von Wolfseck is betrayed by his non-Jewish wife and loses his fortune, and this paves the way for the text’s happy ending. In the eyes of his first wife, who never received a get, the couple was never truly divorced, and Frau Wolfssohn takes her husband back with open arms. He reverses his baptism, officially remarries his wife, and reconciles with his children. He lives out the rest of his life within the happy circle of his family, the model of a Jew who self-consciously embraces orthodoxy. Contrary to Geiger’s claims, then, there were writers of novels concerned with the German-Jewish circumstances of the present, and this fiction found more than its share of readers, inside as well as outside the German-speaking world, and both before Geiger’s 1898 essay and for many years afterwards. In Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, Hebrew and Yiddish translations of Lehmann’s work played a crucial role in the development of indigenous forms of orthodox fiction.15 And many of Lehmann’s novels and novellas are still available in print today, in Hebrew, English, German, and Russian, distributed by publishing houses serving an orthodox clientele, where they are usually marketed as literature suited for both adults and children and as ideal reading for pious adolescents.16 For a critic like Geiger wedded to both religious reform and high culture, writers like Lehmann and Guggenheim were hardly in a position to write the great German-Jewish novel. But Geiger’s total disregard of orthodox fiction is telling, particularly since Gustav Karpeles, the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums at the time, had himself at one point praised the work of Guggenheim, Lehmann, and other orthodox writers as the epitome of authentic Jewish literature. Karpeles was less concerned with denominational divisions than many of his peers, and earlier in his career he coedited Die Jüdische Presse, a Berlin-based orthodox weekly, and he also frequently published himself in orthodox journals. In an 1870 essay in Der Israelit, Karpeles like Geiger offered diatribes against historical fiction, explicitly singling out the work of Ludwig Philippson. At the same time, he hailed the fiction published in

161

162

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Jeschurun and Der Israelit as ideal adaptations of the dictates of poetic realism to contemporary Jewish life, as exemplars of German-Jewish culture that marked a welcome change from the uninspired literature produced by the soulless imitators of the German classics populating the contemporary literary scene.17 For Karpeles in 1870, the great German-Jewish novel was not an elusive quest for the future but a project that had begun to be realized—and a project to which orthodox writers had a special claim. Karpeles’s enthusiasm for the works of Guggenheim and Lehmann has hardly survived in the annals of German-Jewish history. Following in Geiger’s footsteps, scholarship has typically paid scant attention to this considerable body of fiction produced by the orthodox for the orthodox.18 In recent decades the study of German-Jewish orthodoxy has been rescued from the neglect it suffered under historical regimes that were either wedded to the liberal-reformist wing of German Jewry or simply more interested in forms of Jewish life that marked an obvious break from the past than in those that claimed continuity.19 Indeed, much current work in German-Jewish history now effectively integrates the orthodox into its more general narratives about nineteenth-century religious culture, exposing much of what proponents of orthodoxy like Hirsch or Lehmann had in common with their reform-oriented colleagues.20 David Ellenson has argued that German-Jewish orthodoxy’s “struggle both to adapt and to modify Judaism to the new challenges of the time and to maintain a link to the past” led to “tensions and ambivalences” not at all dissimilar to those faced by other segments of the Jewish population.21 If this is true, then studying the role that fiction played in the cultivation of a distinctly orthodox German-Jewish identity is both a productive lens through which to study Jewish modernization more generally and a critical final installment in this book’s investigation into the cultural work that belles lettres performed for German Jews in enabling them to identify themselves as modern, bourgeois, and authentically Jewish all at once. It is the aim of this chapter, therefore, to examine the roles that narrative fiction—primarily orthodox novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life—played in creating and sustaining a vision of orthodoxy as wedded to German culture and ideas about modernity as it was to maintaining the continuity with Jewish tradition which orthodox lead-

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

ers felt reformers had forsaken. As prominent as fiction was in Jeschurun, Der Israelit, and other papers, it always occupied a subordinate position in the orthodox world, inferior to Torah and Talmud study, and ranking far beneath more traditional Jewish reading material. The layout of Der Israelit made this apparent, advertising fiction on the front page in its table of contents but inevitably placing it after lead essays dealing with religious questions, reports on political affairs concerning Jews, and news items and reports of Jewish interest from correspondents around the world. (When publishing Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen in 1837, in contrast, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums often opened its issues with serialized fiction.) Orthodox fiction itself, not surprisingly, often contained scenes with pious men engaged in Talmud study and savoring their nightly readings of a page of Mishnah, or tales of boys who had to leave home so that they might attend schools where, far from the zeal of reformers, Talmudic wisdom was still held in high esteem.22 One tale published in Der Israelit, for instance, concludes with a great-aunt’s pride that because of her influence over her niece and nephew—both of whom were born to families who attempted to “certify their readiness for emancipation by desecrating the Sabbath and eating forbidden foods”—her great-nephew has realized “that there is nothing more beautiful and better than our Torah” and wants to commit himself to a life of Jewish scholarship.23 Yet even in the world of orthodox fiction, traditional forms of Jewish learning often got pushed respectfully to the sidelines. Lehmann’s historical novella “Des Königs Eidam” (The King’s Son-in-Law, 1867), one of his most enduring texts, can serve as an example.24 This tale, set in seventeenth-century Poland, focuses on the trials and tribulations of the daughter of the celebrated Talmudic scholar Rabbi Sabbathai Cohen (1621–1662). Lehmann opens the tale by explicitly addressing male and female readers, advising those who do not know about this towering figure “whose decisions still shape our religious life today” to pay a visit to “the Jewish scholar who lives closest to you.” Only after his readers have consulted with the proper authorities and learned about “one of the greatest of all the great men whom our people has brought forth” does our narrator feel licensed to invite them to “follow me into his modest hut,” the domestic realm that the rabbi inhabits with his young wife, who is on her deathbed, and his six-year-old daughter Esther.25 In

163

164

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

this way, Lehmann carves out a space for literature as a supplement to— but not substitute for—other texts Jews study, making traditional Jewish literacy the prerequisite for the fictional journey he takes his readers on. Lehmann’s readers had the prerogative, of course, of disregarding his narrator’s instructions and forging ahead without consulting rabbinic authorities, and indeed, “Des Königs Eidam” deals only marginally with the great rabbi. After mistakenly assuming his six-year-old daughter to be dead and leaving her behind while fleeing from the Cossacks, the rabbi makes few appearances in the text. Esther is the tale’s protagonist. After being found and adopted by the family of the king of Poland, she develops close relationships with the royal family—despite her refusal to eat non-kosher food and her ongoing fidelity to Judaism. After ten years, she reconnects with other Jews and fortifies her fading attachment to her Jewish roots. She subsequently refuses baptism and stages a dramatic escape from the palace so that she can live happily ever after as a pious Jewess. Years later, we find her happily married in Vilna when Prince Radivizvil, a sworn enemy of the Jews, wants to charge the impoverished Jewish community an exorbitant amount of money to finance his war against the Swedes. Fortunately, it turns out that the prince’s wife, Maria, is Esther’s childhood friend from the royal family, and because of this, Lehmann’s protagonist, “this second Esther of whom her entire nation had reason to be proud,”26 manages to intercede on behalf of her fellow Jews. The story takes place, the narrator explains, “at a time in history when the dawn of the sunrise of humanity which illuminates the modern era was just beginning to break,” and at this point only the “Jews possessed a pure, sublime doctrine, a form of learning that had been at its height for years.” The story’s heroine, apart from speaking perfect French and being versed in the secular knowledge of the day, is a voracious reader of Jewish sources and philosophical works about Judaism. She thus has no problems convincing the prince of the Jewish vision that “all human beings are brothers, and they all have the same claim to this beautiful world, and they should all be equal under the law.”27 As in the case of her biblical namesake, Esther’s efforts are crowned with success. She saves her fellow Jews from ruin, and a close relationship develops between her family and the royal family. And once her story becomes known, she also has a tearful reunion with her long-lost father.

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Karpeles presented his enthusiasm for Guggenheim and Lehmann in the form of a letter to an orthodox woman who, like many of her friends, was an avid reader of novels. From the eighteenth century on, as we have noted earlier, novel-reading was often perceived as a distinctly female pastime, and in traditional Jewish cultures, where only men learned and studied Hebrew, reading literature in the vernacular was even more associated with women. As “Des Königs Eidam” makes clear, in writing fiction, Lehmann was self-consciously turning from a male domain to a female one, from the realm of rabbinic wisdom to women and their domestic world. Fiction gains its legitimacy in a realm adjacent to that of Talmudic scholarship, and in this tale, as in many others, this private female sphere ends up being of major public significance.28 Lehmann’s “second Esther” is as well-versed in Judaism as she is equipped with secular wisdom, and it is precisely this that enables her to save her people by defending Judaism as the harbinger of modernity and universalism. Clearly, Jewish wisdom and secular learning exist together in perfect harmony, in keeping with Samson Raphael Hirsch’s famous watchword Torah im derekh eretz (Torah with the way of the land), his sense that Western culture and strict adherence to Jewish law were perfectly compatible with each other. And it is, significantly, the main female character who embodies the ideals of modern orthodoxy, a fictional Esther who is expected to inspire Lehmann’s male and female readers just as her father’s rabbinic decisions regulate their religious life. In a recent book, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870, Benjamin Maria Baader has traced the “feminization” that Judaism as a whole underwent in the process of German Jewry’s adaptation of bourgeois culture.29 In speaking of feminization, Baader refers both to the increased valorization of domestic Judaism and to the emergence of new public expressions of Judaism—prayer and study in the vernacular, the elevation of women’s natural propensity for piety as a general model, or the phenomenon of the rabbi as novelist, for that matter—that in earlier generations would have been seen as female and as inappropriate for Jewish men. Orthodox fiction, like the other forms of belles lettres we have discussed in this book, may have held particular appeal for women, and it may be no accident that the pioneering orthodox writer of the period was a woman. Yet as much as it participated in the bourgeois cult of domesticity and sought to carve out a legitimate

165

166

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Figure 5. Advertisement for Marcus Lehmann’s Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart as an ideal Bar Mitzvah present and as an appropriate gift for other Jewish holidays, in Der Israelit vol. 20, no.13 (March 26, 1879): 354.

sphere of culture alongside traditionally male forms of Jewish learning, this literature—like the texts we have explored in other chapters—was never seen as strictly a women’s affair. Der Israelit routinely marketed Lehmann’s major anthology of his tales, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (From Past and Present), as an ideal Bar Mitzvah present—a telling index of how crucial this novel type of fiction was perceived to be for women and men, particularly for men at the cusp of Jewish adulthood (Figure 5). Like the other types of Jewish belles lettres we have explored in this book, orthodox fiction was part and parcel of a new model of a Jewish

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

public sphere. In the nineteenth-century Jewish world that orthodox print media helped create, domestic concerns came to occupy center stage in new ways, and fiction came to assume a crucial role in ensuring that current and future generations would remain committed to orthodoxy. This fiction was obviously Jewish and orthodox in content, as the examples above make clear. In their form, nevertheless, these texts borrowed heavily from conventions of the contemporary European literature that increasing numbers of nineteenth-century Jews were reading, often self-consciously imitating and rewriting more mainstream fiction so as to produce orthodox literature that might hold the same appeal and conform to the same aesthetic standards as its more secular counterparts. Mordechai Breuer notes that the orthodox consumed general German and European culture much as did other Jews, and indeed, reading aloud from the German classics was a favorite activity for the Sabbath. “By reading classical dramas and modern novels in their armchairs,” he writes, “people imagined they were full-fledged participants in German cultural life.”30 Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s notion of an “imagined community,” we can note that non-Jews participated in German literary life in much the same way, through an imagined identification with others whom they would never meet face to face.31 The question to be explored here is how the imagined community that orthodox fiction gave rise to both built on and differentiated itself from this larger sense of cultural belonging, how fiction written by the orthodox for the orthodox creatively appropriated secular literature as part of its more general project of ensuring a harmonious union between modern culture and a self-consciously orthodox Judaism. The tensions inherent in this project were evident in the relation between fiction and more traditional Jewish forms of learning as well as in the dynamics by which orthodox writers appropriated secular literary forms. As we shall see in the following section, these issues came to the fore in the initial debates on the status of Jewish fiction in Jeschurun in the late 1850s. Papers like the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and the Jüdisches Volksblatt engaged in sustained discussions of German-Jewish literature long before and long after Geiger’s 1898 essay.32 For the most part, as Itta Shedletzky has argued, orthodox periodicals offered little in the way of explicit reflections on German-Jewish literature.33 Orthodox papers tended to introduce fiction as a matter of course, simply follow-

167

168

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

ing the examples of contemporary liberal family journals such as the best-selling Gartenlaube or competing Jewish papers with a less orthodox bent. Apart from a diatribe against reform Jewish fiction and an essay warning parents and educators to police their children’s reading matter to make sure children were properly schooled in Torah before venturing on to other material, the serialized fiction that emerged in Der Israelit in 1867 was not preceded by any critical discourse whatsoever.34 But the absence of bells and whistles should not be confused with a lack of self-consciousness. Like Lehmann’s “Des Königs Eidam,” orthodox novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life were highly self-reflexive when it came to their own mission. The remainder of the chapter will explore this phenomenon through a representative sampling of the fiction produced by Guggenheim, Lehmann, and others from the 1860s to Lehmann’s death in 1890. This discussion will enable us to formulate a typology of the orthodox novel of German-Jewish life that will foreground not just this literature’s attempts to stage a successful marriage between orthodoxy and modern culture but, just as importantly, the fundamental tensions that emerged in the project to appropriate secular belles lettres in the service of Jewish orthodoxy.

Creating a Sphere for Orthodox Belles Lettres: Debating Fiction in Jeschurun, 1857–1860 In his 1910 biography of his father, Marcus Lehmann’s son Jon fondly remembered “how as a child I read these stories with glowing cheeks and a beating heart. When they were serialized in Der Israelit I could hardly wait to read the continuation of the fates of the heroes. And thousands and thousands of Jewish children had the same experience. In our youth we laughed and cried along with his heroes and heroines and made them our role models.”35 Jon or Jonas Lehmann, born in 1865, was the youngest of Lehmann’s three children, and these recollections of the experiences of entire generation of orthodox youth reading his father’s fiction found their way into many of the English editions of Lehmann’s works, typically integrated into prefaces by other Lehmann descendants.36 Few readers of serialized fiction literature document their responses, and this alone makes this statement of historical value,

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

despite its obvious bias. In the context of our analysis, however, this devoted son’s memory of thousands and thousands of children devouring orthodox fiction in the 1870s and early 1880s is important because of how utterly implausible this scene would have been if it had been set even just one decade earlier. Der treue Zionswächter, the first Germanlanguage orthodox newspaper, carried enthusiastic advertisements for Kompert’s Aus dem Ghetto in 1848, and published two brief works of original fiction in its inaugural volume in 1845: a historical novella set in the aftermath of the French Revolution and a “village tale” modeled on Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Tales, 1843) but set among Jews in Russia.37 The latter text never progressed beyond its initial two-page installment, though, and in subsequent issues, these attempts at fiction found no significant echoes. Hirsch’s Jeschurun started off on a different note in 1854. In its first four years, Hirsch published an essay on Heinrich Heine, a series of essays on Spanish-Jewish literature by Meyer Kayserling and, increasingly, religious poetry as well. In the first issue of the 1857–1858 year— Jeschurun followed the Jewish calendar—Hirsch took the publication of a poem entitled “Sabbathausgang” (Sabbath End) as an occasion to call for more such literature. Deploring the lack of truly inspired German-language poetry that would represent “not the sagas and feelings of Jewish antiquity but Judaism as it is lived today from the perspective of . . . its faithful sons and daughters,” he offered the highest possible praise for this poem.38 And later in that same year, Jeschurun turned its gaze toward literature more decisively, with an essay entitled “Ein Wort über jüdische Belletristik” (A Word about Jewish Belles Lettres) attributed to N. G. that launched a debate between N. G. and Hirsch’s son Isaak about the appropriateness of orthodox Jews reading and writing fiction.39 N. G. was not drawn to Jewish belles lettres because of an intrinsic interest in the subject. Indeed, his goal, he insisted, was not to produce “literary criticism,” and he refused to name any particular works. However, Salomon Mosenthal’s popular biblical drama Deborah (1845)— later dubbed by Lehmann a “drama with Jewish figures written in a supremely un-Jewish spirit”—very much lurks in the background of his essay.40 N. G. argues that the stories Jewish young people need to read can all be found in the Bible, and there is nothing in Judaism that

169

170

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

makes belles lettres necessary. Biblical literacy may have declined in recent years, he concedes, but it is a “foolish endeavor” and a “desecration of the Most Holy” to think that artistic depictions of biblical material in dramas and novellas can stand in for the “pure, unadulterated potion of the Holy Word, which alone can refresh and strengthen.”41 The reason for publishing this “word on Jewish belles lettres” comes thus not from within Judaism but from without. In recent years, N. G. notes, the “drive for education [Bildung] has, like an electric shock, touched all levels of Jewish society”; as a side effect of this all-pervasive quest for Bildung, which he welcomes, “reading [belles lettres] has become one of the most influential and universal means of influencing young people.”42 Male and female Jews are now increasingly drawn to literature, regardless of what their rabbis and teachers might think. Given the “abuse and denigrations of Jews and all Jewish efforts” that one typically finds in contemporary fiction by non-Jews, efforts to produce Jewish belles lettres thus have to be welcomed—as long as such literature respects the primacy of scripture and is written by “true Jews.”43 In “Der Jude in der Literatur” (The Jew in Literature), the enthusiastic response to N. G. he published one year later in Jeschurun, Isaak Hirsch turned his attention to the way non-orthodox Jews like Mosenthal represented Judaism and Jewish life in their fiction. Hirsch complains explicitly about Mosenthal and Kompert, neither of whom, he notes, is engaged in “faithfully fulfilling Jewish law.” As a result, the “image of the Jew they present to the world” is alienated from Jewish “reality” and “truth,” and in this sense their allegedly Jewish literature does not differ from the “caricatures” of Jewish life one finds in the work of non-Jewish writers. Like other contemporary writers who are “Jews in name alone,” Kompert and Mosenthal stand outside orthodox Judaism and thus lack the proper perspective to represent Judaism in an authentic manner.44 Jewish belles lettres, in other words, needs someone who will represent Judaism from within, a claim Hirsch advances as part of a broader theory of representation. For Hirsch, the uniqueness of the Jewish people lies in the way they have survived “in their original character” throughout history: “every [orthodox] Jew is the living representative of the once powerful nation, and each Jew testifies more eloquently for the truthfulness of the historical traditions than pyramids or cuneiform

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

texts could ever do.”45 Without literature, then, Jews who live authentic Jewish lives in keeping with Jewish law have had no problems representing Judaism. Each orthodox Jew is a living representative of the Jewish people in its entirety, and in this sense, Jews differ radically from the extinct peoples of the past who have left traces in ancient monuments and forms of writing that only make sense when they are studied and carefully deciphered by modern scholars. Judaism for Hirsch is alive, it is eternal, and it has universal value. Every Jew living a life in accordance with Jewish law serves as a “sign” pointing to God. Judaism’s contribution to the world has been immense: “Christianity with its manifold varieties, Islam and the various systems of philosophy— they have all arisen from the law [and] from the teaching whose great preacher is the Jew.”46 Promoting this understanding of Judaism as a self-representing totality that has given rise to Christianity, Islam, and the entirety of modern philosophy, Isaak Hirsch renders Jewish fiction superfluous, at least in theory. Judaism may offer a perfect system of self-representation, but the present moment finds this system at risk of being undone by a new generation’s rage for reading both secular literature and Jewish literature that blatantly misrepresents Judaism and thereby threatens to lead pious Jews astray. In this way, Hirsch carves out a legitimate sphere for Jewish fiction, calling for the development of orthodox belles lettres as an antidote to fiction that fails to represent Judaism from the perspective of those who live within it. Therefore, as superfluous as it may be in theory, orthodox fiction is in practice a matter of the greatest urgency. Once Isaak Hirsch presented orthodox fiction as a vital need, N. G. responded by reflecting on the aesthetic value of such literature, and this aspect of the debates in Jeschurun touched on what would later become a defining feature of orthodox fiction, its vision of itself not just as a legitimate art form but as a superior one. Agreeing wholeheartedly with Hirsch, N. G. added that it was not always a lack of familiarity with true, authentic Judaism that leads Jewish writers to create such inauthentic forms of Jewish literature. Many authors intentionally use fiction as “warriors for their religious movements.”47 N. G.’s chief example is Phöbus Philippson’s historical novella Der unbekannte Rabbi (The Unknown Rabbi), which was serialized in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and was published by the Institut zur Förderung der is-

171

172

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

raelitischen Literatur in 1859. He introduces this work to his orthodox readers as a prime example of a conscious use of fiction to manipulate and produce a “reformation” (Neugestaltung) of traditional Judaism. The problem with such literature, N. G. notes, is not just its content. By reducing fiction to its ideological function, Philippson is little more than a “Tendenzschriftsteller,” a partisan writer whose works lack any claim to aesthetic standards of good art.48 Several years later, in the only lead article in Der Israelit that dealt with contemporary literature in the 1860s, Lehmann voiced similar sentiments. He praised Kompert, contrasting the truth of his authentic literature with the “misuse of literature as propaganda for religious reform in Judaism.” The problem with Ludwig and Phöbus Philippson’s fiction, Lehmann insisted, was not just its content but its lack of formal perfection as literature. For Kompert, Lehmann elaborates, literature is an “end in itself,” and this is why his artistic depictions of ghetto life have “reached such a high degree of perfection.”49 In subsequent issues of Jeschurun, polemics against the Philippson brothers served as an occasion to ruminate further on the potential aesthetic status of orthodox fiction. In 1859, N. G. published under the rubric “Jüdische Belletristik” (Jewish belles lettres) an essay on Ludwig Philippson’s historical novella Mariamne, die letzte Hasmonäerin (Mariamne, the Last Hasmonean, 1856). Invoking his earlier admonition against historical fiction on biblical themes, N. G. indicted this work for its “lack of taste,” its “complete inability to capture the color of past eras,” its poor style, and its overall “carelessness.”50 Soon thereafter, in his next essay, he returned to Phöbus Philippson, expressing outrage that Der unbekannte Rabbi was part of the offerings of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur; clearly, this Jewish publication society was not living up to its claims that it subscribed to neutrality where confessional divisions were concerned.51 According to N. G., the problem with Der unbekannte Rabbi was as much its partisan content as its fundamental lack of aesthetic standards: Readers who love having literature excite them vehemently and cause them to shed tears will be glad at the appearance of this novella, which belongs to a now, thank God, forgotten chapter [Romanepoche] of German literature. Those who demand that literature should represent the world and its hustle and bustle and depict the human soul and its

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

struggles, and that the light of poetry should illuminate and transfigure both the world and human beings—these readers will turn away from this work dissatisfied and justly repulsed.52

The problem with the Philippsons, again, is not just the reformist tendency of their work but that they write cheap, sentimental fiction that fails to conform to the most basic modern aesthetic standards. Against this backdrop, N. G. calls for the development of Jewish literature that would achieve, on an aesthetic level, what has proved so elusive for the Philippsons. “What we need, we repeat, are archetypes we can imitate, archetypes showing us true Jewish life and conduct, archetypes to inspire us and give us pleasure.”53 In this way, N. G., Issak Hirsch, and Lehmann all paint a picture of the contemporary world where orthodox fiction would have a legitimate role to play. Authentically Jewish fiction is necessary as a countermeasure to reform-oriented literature that threatens to dislodge the primacy of scripture and lead orthodox Jews away from a life lived according to Jewish law. But it also has a broader, aesthetic function, one that has less to do with Judaism per se than with the effective integration of Jews into a social order that values fiction for its ability to illuminate and transfigure the world. In a society dominated by an allpervasive quest for Bildung, orthodox Jews have a legitimate claim to literature that offers an aesthetic transfiguration of the German-Jewish circumstances of the present, literature that enables them to imagine their own lives as being worthy of being transformed into a novel. In the contemporary world, Jewish belles lettres has a right to excellence, and if such fiction is ever going to meet aesthetic standards and not descend into mere propaganda, it will apparently have to be authored by the orthodox. In his biography of his father, Jon Lehmann noted that his father’s fiction was never an end in itself but always served the purpose of “illustrating how a life lived in accordance with Jewish religious law makes one happy in this world and gives us hope” for the world to come.54 Not surprisingly, commentators have often emphasized the didactic function of orthodox literature. Breuer notes that orthodox fiction was, like its reform counterpart, “thoroughly engagé,”55 and our foray into the pedagogical function of this literature in the next section will give us no reason to question this claim. When it came to justifying Jewish

173

174

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

fiction, however, orthodox elites did much more than call for literature that would do for orthodoxy what the Philippson brothers and others were doing for liberal Judaism. They called for the creation of Jewish literature that would be able to present itself as true art, and they did so by invoking the postulate of aesthetic autonomy—the norm that art should be an “end in itself ”—so characteristic of German visions of Bildung and high culture from the late eighteenth century onward. By the end of the debates in Jeschurun in 1860 it had become clear that orthodox fiction was necessary both as an aesthetic project in its own right and as an antidote to other forms of literature written by non-Jews or by Jews who had abandoned Jewish law. For orthodoxy to survive in the modern world, Jews not only needed to read fiction with appropriate Jewish content, consuming literature that would, in Samson Raphael Hirsch’s words, capture “Judaism as it is lived today from the perspective of . . . its faithful sons and daughters.”56 They also needed to produce the great German-Jewish novel, to capture the German-Jewish circumstances of the present in a work of prose fiction that would fulfill orthodox Jews’ legitimate need for art and Bildung. Indeed, we shall come to see that despite its liberal borrowings from sentimental melodrama and the suspense-driven world of serialized fiction, orthodox fiction inevitably presented itself not as popular entertainment with the proper religious inflection but as an ideal form of high culture, one able to compete with the best that great literature had to offer. In this sense, orthodox belles lettres presents its own distinctive model of middlebrow fiction, an orthodox variation of Jewish literature seeking to navigate a middle ground between popular entertainment and the allures of high culture. And practically as soon as this aesthetic program was elaborated, Jeschurun began to provide its readers with a steady diet of this type of fiction. Starting in February 1859, a series of “Kleine Bilder aus der jüdischen Gegenwart” (Small Pictures of PresentDay Jewish Life) began to appear irregularly,57 and in 1862–1863, fiction became a regular item in Jeschurun’s table of contents, with the journal publishing two stories by Issak Hirsch’s sister, Sara Hirsch Guggenheim. Guggenheim’s first tale, “Aus der Judengasse” (From the Jewish Quarter), recounted a tale of Jewish martyrdom amidst anti-Jewish riots in a medieval ghetto, and with her second story, “Aus der Gegenwart” (From the Present), she turned self-consciously to the con-

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

temporary world that would occupy her in much of her subsequent work.58 By 1864–1865, when it published her serialized novel Licht- und Schattenbilder (Pictures of Light and Darkness), Jeschurun accompanied each installment with a warning against piracy, signaling that this fiction was perceived to be original and of value.59 By 1867–1868, Jeschurun had published seven major novels or novellas by Guggenheim, and Der Israelit too began delivering serialized fiction to its readers—evidence that readers of orthodox newspapers were as eager to consume this fiction as their leaders were to disseminate it.

Beyond Corneille, Shakespeare, Calderon, and Dante: The Rabbi as Novelist The novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life that filled the pages of Jeschurun and Der Israelit left little to the imagination when it came to their religious commitments. In the melodramatic worlds created by Guggenheim, Lehmann, and others, orthodox piety and fidelity to tradition inevitably lead to spiritual happiness, emotional fulfillment, and good fortune, and Jews who turn their back on Jewish law typically meet a tragic end. Before we consider how these texts deal with the question of their aesthetic status as literature, it will be necessary to gain some familiarity with the typical content and didactic function of these works. Against this backdrop we will then consider how these works reflect on their status as middlebrow fiction, examining how they draw on, while seeking to create an alternative to, more mainstream forms of contemporary literature. Perhaps the most recurrent theme in this body of literature is the necessity of giving children a religious education that will ensure they embrace orthodoxy self-consciously and self-confidently as adults. Guggenheim’s second major prose work, “Aus der Gegenwart II” (From the Present Day II), published in four installments in Jeschurun in 1863– 1864, focuses on a young woman, Aurelie Werner, who knows little about Judaism apart from the “Jewish catechism” she learned as part of her confirmation.60 Schooled in the reform tradition and deeply attracted to organ music, Aurelie feels that Judaism is close enough to Christianity to render conversion unproblematic. Much to the horror

175

176

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

of her pious father, she elopes with a count. Once her marriage turns sour, however, a medallion containing her beloved grandmother’s hair invokes childhood memories of her grandmother’s death on Yom Kippur. Moved by this connection to her past and the promise of atonement and redemption it invokes, she departs with her young son to reconnect with her estranged father. Herr Werner, recognizing that it was his fault “that our holy law was so foreign to you,” accepts Aurelie with open arms and acknowledges that Jewish daughters in the modern world obviously need a different type of education than what they received “in earlier times, in the age of the ghettos and the complete separation from the non-Jewish world.”61 According to Jewish law, Herr Werner points out, Aurelie has never stopped being a Jewess, and the happy trio promptly sets off for Amsterdam, where civil law permits Jews to convert back to Judaism, and where Aurelie’s four-year-old son is circumcised. Women’s education was a major concern of all branches of German Jewry in the nineteenth century, and Samson Raphael Hirsch, writing in Jeschurun, often emphasized the importance of family and women in particular in ensuring lifelong commitments to orthodoxy.62 It should thus hardly be surprising that his daughter’s fiction repeatedly voices the need for proper religious education for women. In the tale discussed above, however, as in many others, the need to educate one’s daughters is more than a theme. Novellas like “Aus der Gegenwart II” themselves perform active damage control, creating narratives that warn Jewish families about the disastrous consequences of a failure to commit to orthodoxy. Guggenheim compensates with her fiction for the possible lack of a proper religious education for women, investing literature with the pedagogical task of educating the next generation in fidelity to Jewish tradition. Her tales were not designed to appeal solely to women, and as one might expect, the frequently tragic ends of the heroes and heroines of orthodox fiction are just as often rooted in the poor religious education of young men. Guggenheim’s first tale, “Aus der Gegenwart,” can serve as an example. Guggenheim tells the story of a pious young woman, Arabella, who, under pressure from her parents, marries a wealthy young man with a reform background. Arabella manages to secure a promise from her future husband that he will become a good Jew and observe the

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Sabbath and the commandments. Despite the fact that all her husband knows about Judaism comes from the religious education he received for a few weeks prior to his confirmation, he enters the marriage with the best of intentions. Eventually, he comes around to following all the commandments in her presence, but his lack of true conviction troubles her. He inadvertently writes on the Sabbath, and in an even bigger blunder, he throws a surprise party for her on Tisha B’Av, causing her to fall seriously ill. Four years later, when she learns from her four-yearold son that her husband has been eating mussels with a friend and has even let her son partake of these non-kosher delicacies, she takes a turn for the worse and dies. The story concludes with Arabella’s pious father leaving synagogue on the Sabbath—only to encounter his grandson, now grown up, proudly smoking a cigar.63 The didactic function of this text could not be clearer: orthodoxy is the key to a blissful marriage and a happy home life, and Arabella’s parents are at fault for letting their obsessions with wealth and upward mobility get in the way of their daughter’s right to have the sort of pious husband who would have made her happy. This text, moreover, is not just about the importance of having a proper Jewish education and being on the lookout for those who do not. Guggenheim drives these messages home through a pedagogy of fear, creating melodramatic scenarios that give her readers a crash course in the dangers of straying from orthodoxy, using fiction to teach or reinforce lessons that may not have been properly imparted in other educational settings. During his student days in Berlin, when Lehmann toyed with the idea of becoming a writer, he was drawn to historical material,64 and when he began publishing fiction in Der Israelit in 1867, he started with historical tales such as “Des Königs Eidam.” With the fifth piece of fiction he published that year, however, he made a characteristic turn to the contemporary world, giving his own rabbinic spin to the genre inaugurated by Guggenheim. Like Jeschurun’s tales of contemporary Jewish life in many ways, Lehmann’s texts tend to favor happier endings, often made possible by the active involvement of orthodox rabbis, who often help the adults in his fiction get the Jewish education they failed to receive as children. “Die Verlassene” (The Abandoned Woman), Lehmann’s first piece of serialized fiction focusing on the contemporary world, already illus-

177

178

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

trates the strong rabbinic presence in his work. “Die Verlassene” tells the story of Friederike Salz, a spoiled young woman who is disowned by her orthodox parents after she marries a physician known as a roué at the reform temple in the Austrian provincial town of P.65 After her husband disappears while they are on vacation in Vienna—it turns out, we discover later, that he was kidnapped by his former lover from his student days, an actress—Friederike returns home and reconciles with her parents. Fifteen years later, after her parents have died, she falls prey to a Christian con man who wins her affections and appeals to ideas about modernity, progress, reason, and universal humanity so that she will convert to Christianity, marry him, and give him access to her not inconsiderable fortune. Traveling in Germany, she has the good sense to consult with an orthodox rabbi in a town on the banks of the Rhine, an obvious fictional equivalent to Lehmann in Mainz. One of the stock characters in Lehmann’s fiction is the virtuous orthodox rabbi who, in the face of secular authorities and popular ridicule in the media, refuses to allow a Jewish woman to remarry until proper evidence of her husband’s death has materialized.66 The rabbi in “Die Verlassene” is no different. He explains to Friederike that in the absence of direct proof of her husband’s death, Jewish law cannot permit her to remarry, even though civil law would allow it. He thus gives her a Jewish alternative to the con man’s rhetoric of secularism and universal humanity, explaining that “the world can receive no greater Enlightenment than what it received at Sinai through the light of divine revelation.”67 After her consultation with the rabbi, Friederike is plagued by dreams, first of her wedding vows and then of her parents, and eventually she willingly and happily submits to the authority of Jewish law. And her wholehearted acceptance of orthodoxy has its rewards. Thanks to the rabbi’s advice, she escapes the clutches of the con man, and the rabbi also manages to locate her husband, whose former lover had him locked up in a London insane asylum for fifteen years after he had refused to betray his wife. During his incarceration, he found solace in his Hebrew prayer book and he too has returned to the orthodox faith of his youth. The rabbi’s detective work reunites the couple, and the novella closes with a letter to the rabbi, in which both husband and wife beseech him to write up and publish “our story so that it might serve as a lesson and a warning to others.”68

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Lehmann thus reflects explicitly on the office of the rabbi as novelist. The narrator of this tale of contemporary Jewish life is himself a rabbi, and this rabbi claims that the story he is passing on to his readers is not fiction at all but a true story, one whose main characters have turned to the orthodox rabbi as the proper authority to broadcast it “as a lesson and a warning.” Indeed, the letter that concludes “Die Verlassene” is dated October 29, 1867, just one week before our rabbi-narrator published the first installment of the tale on November 6, 1867. The notion that a fictional tale would parade as an authentic, practically real-time depiction of real-life occurrences is a characteristic element of the European novel from the eighteenth century onward.69 Lehmann draws on this convention as a means of authorizing his own entry into the literary world, creating literature that has the explicit stamp of rabbinic approval, fiction that self-consciously casts the rabbi as a novelist of everyday life. In the world of Lehmann’s fiction, pious Jews in 1867 desperately want their stories to be told, and they turn to the editor of Der Israelit, the rabbi on the banks of the Rhine, asking him to make sure that this crucial pedagogical task is fulfilled. In this sense, Lehmann goes beyond Jeschurun’s preliminary discussions about the legitimacy of orthodox literature. Writing self-consciously as a rabbi-novelist, he creates through his own example the model of a mutually beneficial relationship between orthodoxy and belles lettres. In his subsequent fiction about contemporary Jewish life, Lehmann repeatedly legitimates his work in this manner, often using an orthodox rabbi in a town on the banks of the Rhine as a first-person narrator who at times doubles as a detective.70 Lehmann’s “Elvire” (1868), which carries the subtitle, “As Told by a Rabbi,” continues these reflections on the role of the rabbi as novelist, linking the question of the rabbi-novelist explicitly to orthodox fiction’s own view of itself as art.71 Like the narrator in “Die Verlassene,” the rabbi in “Elvire” communicates a “story that I experienced myself.”72 Elvire is the daughter of his old friend Adolph Metz, a highly educated and well-meaning banker who flirted with reform during his students days before the rabbi managed to set him back on the proper path and ensure that he marry a pious, orthodox woman. Much to the rabbi’s dismay, Herr and Frau Metz, like many other parents in orthodox fiction, fail to give their

179

180

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

daughter a properly balanced Jewish and secular education. Herr Metz, indeed, insists that Elvire should “develop without hindrances” and read whatever she likes.73 As a result, his daughter enjoys reading Corneille, Shakespeare, Calderon, and Dante in the original, has great talent for playing Beethoven sonatas on the piano, and is particularly taken with love stories like Romeo and Juliet. Needless to say, like Guggenheim’s Aurelie Werner, Elvire has little emotional or intellectual attachment to Judaism. During the revolutionary fervor of 1848, she falls in love and subsequently elopes with a free-thinking, liberal state official named Wetting, taking advantage of a new law permitting civil marriages. Eventually, the marriage turns sour, as Elvire and Wetting lack not just a common religious foundation but “that particular feeling of tenderness that only Jewish marriages know and that prevails only in Jewish families.”74 Once the tides change, a conservative regime is reinstated, and with talk of a Christian state on the horizon, her husband shows his true colors, pressuring his wife to get herself and their young daughter baptized. Desperate and with nowhere else to turn, Elvire contacts her family friend, the rabbi. He convinces her to avoid the baptismal font and return to live among Jews, and she returns to her parents a penitent daughter. The tale concludes in the present, in 1868, with the rabbi officiating at the wedding of Elvire’s daughter to a pious young man, where he makes a toast to Elvire and the important charity work she has been engaged in. Elvire thus finds redemption, if not complete happiness, and by telling her story, and by warning his readers of a “new form of temptation . . . that has become possible in our times of late,” the rabbi cautions his readers not to follow in his heroine’s erroneous footsteps.75 Given the ambivalence that opened Jeschurun’s debates on Jewish belles lettres, it is striking how confidently Lehmann presented his fiction to the readers of Der Israelit just one decade later. For the narrator of Lehmann’s tales it is not just permissible for a rabbi to write fiction. It appears, rather, central to his office as rabbi, crucial to the publicity work that seeks to ensure that the readers of Der Israelit do not follow the example of Elvire Metz and the numerous other heroes and heroines who falter in their commitment to orthodoxy. And given that Elvire’s problems were brought on, to a certain extent, by reading literature, it appears to be of particular urgency that cautionary tales like Lehmann’s

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

be made available to the public. Orthodox literature thus gives its readers something they cannot get from Corneille, Shakespeare, Calderon, and Dante, a form of literature better suited to their needs than the European classics. As the lesson of Elvire’s tale makes clear, it is certainly permissible for orthodox Jews to read and appreciate such literature. These texts, however, desperately need to be balanced by the new, modern orthodox classics, texts which present themselves—as we shall see in the following section—as a legitimate and superior art form.

Dislodging High Culture: Heine, Schiller, and the Promise of Orthodox Art At the beginning of Lehmann’s “Das Testament” (The Will, 1872–1873), the young landscape painter Berthold Bruchhäuser finds himself in Mainz, desperate to find a kosher restaurant where he might purchase something to eat aboard the steamship on the Rhine that will take him on the final leg of his journey from Italy to his nearby hometown. After a friendly native—yet another one of Lehmann’s rabbi-narrators—helps him locate some nineteenth-century kosher take-out, Bruchhäuser boards the ship, and the story begins that this narrator now conveys to the readers of Der Israelit with Bruchhäuser’s blessings. On the steamer, our landscape painter encounters some Jews from his hometown and happily acts as their tour guide as they sail down the Rhine, sharing his fellow travelers’ pride in this great German treasure. When they pass by the Loreley, the famous rock formation that was the subject of one of the most popular of Heinrich Heine’s poems, the conversation naturally turns to Heine. When Bruchhäuser is asked if he thinks this great German writer would still have been a great poet if he had remained a “strict Jew,” he offers up his own thoughts on Jewish art: I believe, no, I am firmly convinced that Heine would have achieved even greater, more significant, more everlasting things if he had remained true to his religion and stood on serious, moral ground. With his eminent abilities he would have been able to strive for the highest and achieve greatness. In a few years, who he was, what he wrote and created will all be forgotten, with the exception of some individual songs that have now become common property of the people. For only

181

182

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

that which is based on truth and morality has a claim to immortality and can defy transitoriness.76

As an orthodox artist, Bruchhäuser occupies a critical perspective that enables him to point out Heine’s shortcomings. Heine, we are told, will perish, failing to achieve immortality because he strayed from the path of orthodoxy. The point is not simply that Heine is still read today while the fictional painter Bruchhäuser is known only to the most die-hard Lehmann aficionados. Rather, in “Das Testament,” as in “Elvire,” secular literature comes off as deficient, inferior to the aesthetic grandeur to which orthodox art apparently can aspire. Orthodoxy is, it seems, in an excellent position to produce art that aspires to greatness and to dislodge towering figures like Heine from their central position in German culture. The critical devaluation of high culture runs like a red thread through the fiction produced in Jeschurun and Der Israelit, providing an ongoing critical commentary on the equally dominant position that conceives of orthodoxy and modern culture as perfectly compatible with each other. On the one hand, in keeping with Samson Raphael Hirsch’s visions of modern orthodoxy, orthodox fiction routinely celebrates individuals like Bruchhäuser who find the perfect balance between Judaism and secular culture. Rosa Schwarz, the heroine of Guggenheim’s novel Risse (Rifts, 1866–1867), for instance, has had the good fortune of having been raised by her paternal grandmother, and far away from her naïve mother, who at the beginning of the tale outrages her family when she falls prey to a reform rabbi’s suggestion that she wear her hair uncovered. As a result, Rosa is brought up full of “love for the religion of her forefathers” at the same time “as no branch of profane education [Bildung] was foreign to her.”77 As example after example drives home, Jewish orthodoxy is suited to exist in perfect harmony with German visions of Bildung and high culture. In “Gabriel,” a patriotic novella by Lehmann published in 1871, it is through teaching his pious French fiancée German and introducing her to the spirit of the German classics that the title character and his future wife fall in love.78 In Lehmann’s frequently reprinted tale, “Unmöglich” (Impossible, 1869), Louise Lindenstein reads secular literature with a firm sense that Judaism is the “highest and most holy”; when she quotes famous lines uttered by the Marquis de Posa in Schiller’s Don Carlos at a dinner party, she is shocked

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

when one of her nouveau riche reform acquaintances gets confused and asks whether “Prosa”—the German word for prose—appears in Shakespeare’s Faust!79 This idealized harmony between orthodox piety and European high culture, however, is just as frequently the product of a precarious balancing act, and orthodox fiction routinely urges its readers to approach secular literature with care. In this sense, Bruchhäuser’s diatribes against Heine are a telling symptom, part of the general critiques of more mainstream literature through which orthodox fiction sings its own praises. One of the reasons why Louise Lindenstein agrees to accept the notso-pious husband her father forces on her in “Unmöglich” is that her fiancé appears versant in “all the latest works of literature” and knows so many “charming anecdotes about famous writers, men of state, actors and virtuosos, some of whom he knew personally.”80 Louise learns quickly that all that glitters is not gold when it comes to belles lettres. Soon thereafter, she discovers her husband smoking on the Sabbath, and just moments after she cites Schiller to the philistines at the dinner party, her husband tricks her into eating non-kosher meat (and she faints). In other texts, Schiller can be used to opposite ends. In Guggenheim’s Licht- und Schattenbilder (Pictures of Light and Darkness, 1865), reading Don Carlos at age sixteen helps initiate a life marked by sexual impropriety for one young man, who convinces himself he has fallen in love with his stepmother; several years later, he dies a shameful death in the apartment of his mistress, a poor, non-Jewish seamstress. Licht- und Schattenbilder also launches the caricature of the reform rabbi—a recurring type in orthodox fiction—creating a character one of whose fatal flaws is an obsession with German literature. When we first encounter the hypocritical, womanizing Dr. Fuchs at a dinner party, he is playing Lionel in a makeshift production of Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maiden from Orleans). Fuchs frequently quotes Lessing, and the flowery language of his sermons reminds his congregants of the German writer Jean Paul Richter. When at the dinner party he gets involved in a serious debate with an orthodox man about the status of women in Judaism, he promptly withdraws from the discussion to continue with the reading of Schiller, clearly indicating a superficial preference for the cultural cachet of belles lettres over Jewish tradition.81 In the case of Fuchs, who eventually impregnates one of his young congregants,

183

184

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

reading the classics hardly ensures the discovery of truth and morality that Bruchhäuser expected from great art. For pious young men and women, works by Guggenheim or Lehmann would seem a far safer choice than Schiller. In scenes like this, Guggenheim and Lehmann give an orthodox twist to a long tradition of invoking the dangers of reading that goes back, in German literature, at least to Christoph Martin Wieland’s reworking of Cervantes’s Don Quixote in his 1753 novel Don Sylvio. There are, as we noted above, numerous positive examples of reading literature in orthodox fiction. We even encounter one young woman, Hulda Wolf in Lehmann’s Gegenströmungen (Counter-Currents, 1880), who has been an avid reader of Der Israelit since early childhood.82 More often than not, though, we are introduced to young Jews—and particularly young Jewish men—whose voracious consumption of secular literature gets them into trouble. One of the main characters in Auf Irrwegen (Gone Astray, 1874), Bernard Falk, is a man in his twenties who, when orphaned at the age of twelve, had the misfortune of being brought up by an uncle who was pious but only out of habit. As a result, Bernard never had the opportunity to acquire proper Jewish learning as a teenager and became obsessed instead with contemporary literature, reading indiscriminately, and eventually losing his moral compass entirely. Thankfully, he experiences a spiritual rebirth one evening in Hamburg when he walks by a house where an orthodox family is celebrating Chanukah. He hears a teenage girl (whom he later marries) singing “Maoz Tzur,” which brings back memories of early childhood and fortifies his fading connection to Jewish piety.83 Isaac Rosenstrauß, the protagonist of Vater und Sohn (Father and Son, 1868), suffers from a similar disorder. Born in Poland in 1831, Isaac is orphaned and then raised by his aunt and uncle, traditionally pious Jews who, like Bernard Falk’s uncle, are ill equipped for the upheavals of the modern world. While studying Talmud in a town near the Prussian border, Isaac decides it is not a crime to read Russian, German, or French. He too becomes a voracious reader of the “literary treasures in these languages,” developing an insatiable passion for German belles lettres in particular. Like many other young men in this position, the narrator tells us, Isaac mistakenly deems every book printed in German to be a masterpiece, and therein lay “the germ of his future ruin.”84 He

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

ends up abandoning his wife and converting to Christianity, only to find his way back to Judaism decades later, when he reunites with a son he never knew he had and sets off to make a new life for himself in Germany. Bernhard Fünfkirchner, the protagonist of “Haw, Haw!” (Give, Give! 1873)—to cite one final example—takes a developmental turn for the worse when he is kicked out of the yeshiva in his native town in Hungary for reading “German books, the classics as well as the nonclassics, the works of Schiller and Alexandre Dumas, Goethe and Kotzebue, Lessing and Eugène Sue.”85 Once set on this path, Fünfkirchner moves to Vienna, turns his back on orthodoxy, speculates on the stock market and actively campaigns for reform. A crass materialist who gets dubbed “king of the stock market” in Vienna, he eventually looses everything in the market crash of 1873 and subsequently commits suicide, prompting his wife to do the same. “Haw, Haw!” contrasts Fünfkirchner’s ruin with the life history of its other main protagonist, Leo Ullstein. After trials and tribulations, Leo embraces orthodoxy selfconsciously, marries his pious cousin Mirjam from the provinces, and sets up a modest, “bourgeois-respectable” home in Vienna predicated on “virtue, fear of God, charity, love, and harmony.”86 Clearly, tales like Auf Irrwegen, Vater und Sohn, and “Haw, Haw!” that chart a return to Judaism occupy a higher plane than the literature that played such a key role in leading Jews astray. Orthodox fiction never categorically rejects mainstream belles lettres, and even the traditionally minded Hungarian rabbi who sends Fünfkirchner packing in “Haw, Haw!” can quote Schiller’s famous drama Die Räuber (The Robbers) when it suits him.87 Secular literature needs merely to be approached with caution, properly supplemented by knowledge and study of Jewish texts and the model forms of Jewish belles lettres Lehmann spent so much time and energy disseminating. Different pieces of literature make this explicit in different ways. The ultimate consensus, following Bruchhäuser, however, is that whatever its indebtedness to melodrama and the fast-paced plots of serialized fiction and the “non-classics” Fünfkirchner consumed as a young man alongside the works of Schiller, Goethe, and Lessing, orthodox fiction harbors the potential to be an art form superior to European high culture. In Säen und Ernten (To Sow and to Reap, 1870), Lehmann reflects

185

186

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

on these issues explicitly through criticism directed at both Shakespeare and Schiller. The novel opens with a scene where pious Jews criticize the wealthy banker Wilhelm Wolfssohn for having scenes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice performed at a dinner party before a non-Jewish audience—a clear sign for them of the extent to which the protagonist has internalized the anti-Jewish stereotypes that populate Western literature.88 And Naphtali Ruhdorf, a pious young man who is one of the novel’s heroes, teaches Wolfssohn’s children to approach Schiller with an equal degree of care. Speaking of Schiller’s poem, “Die Götter Griechenlands” (The Gods of Greece), a pivotal text for the love affair with Greece so important for nineteenth-century German culture and visions of Bildung, Ruhdorf explains that “Greek mythology is certainly beautiful, but it is untrue, it is immoral. The Greeks idolized themselves and their passions in the Gods, and there is no greater crime than idolatry, however beautiful it may be. We Jews believe in the one God who revealed himself to us at Sinai and who forbade us to have other Gods before him.”89 Clearly, Shakespeare and Schiller have their problems, and fiction that imparts the wisdom that Naphtali gives voice to is thus truer, more moral, and greater—if not actually more beautiful—than the works typically enshrined as exemplars of high culture. And this vision of the superiority of orthodox art is inextricable from Säen und Ernten’s own vision of itself as a novel. Early on in the story, Wolfssohn urges his daughter to get baptized so that he might marry her off to a wealthy nobleman. His daughter refuses, which prompts her father to scream out at her in anger that such “girlish dreams” of marital happiness “do not exist on earth—one finds them only in novels.”90 When the daughter answers that she has “frequently witnessed such happiness first hand,” in the pious Ruhdorf family, whose Sabbath celebrations and warm family togetherness are repeatedly juxtaposed to Wolfssohn’s obsession with wealth and upward mobility, she only further provokes her father’s wrath. By the end of the novel, she ends up finding true love and marrying Naphtali Ruhdorf, a clear signal to the readers of Der Israelit that romantic love and familial happiness are not just the stuff of novels: they are a realistic possibility for anyone who refuses the potential idolatry of German culture in order to remain true to Judaism as revealed at Sinai.

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Novels like Säen und Ernten, like the patriotic “Gabriel,” Vater und Sohn, and many others, make this move without ever abandoning their attachments to German culture. Indeed, at the end of Säen und Ernten, expatriate friends of Frau Wolfssohn from London return to Germany, to a homeland and language they have been longing for since they left decades earlier. The text charts a similar movement from east to west as well, in the person of Rabbi Auser, a Polish Talmudic scholar who casts off his native Yiddish, masters proper German, and marries one of the Ruhdorf girls, delighted to leave the primitive world of Poland behind. In Auf Irrwegen, Bernard Falk ultimately also returns to Germany after a sojourn in America, accompanied by a huge party of German Jews: not just his best friend and future brother-in-law Adolf Landorff but also Landorff ’s Philadelphia-born fiancée and her family, the Gerolzhofens, Bavarian immigrants who are only too happy to return to a fatherland that allows modern orthodoxy to flourish. And for all these texts, part of what it means for orthodoxy to thrive in the modern world is that it produces its own brand of German culture, one that is both distinctly and authentically Jewish as well as meeting the highest possible aesthetic standards.

Middlebrow Culture and Its Discontents Once Bruchhäuser establishes himself as a painter in Lehmann’s “Das Testament,” his work provokes universal admiration. Whatever their claims to aesthetic grandeur, in contrast, the melodramatic fictions of contemporary Jewish life written by the orthodox for the orthodox have historically been of little interest to anyone but the orthodox. In terms of where they were published and their formal design, these middlebrow narratives launched a minority literature that pronounced its own aesthetic superiority in a manner that tended to discount rather than engage its non-orthodox readers. Kompert’s ghetto tales were read and reviewed positively in the general German press, prompting Der Israelit to conclude that this fiction promoted integration by “arousing respect among our non-Jewish fellow citizens for our peculiarities.”91 Indeed, as a form of German-Jewish literature, we remember from Chapter 2, ghetto fiction was unique in appealing to

187

188

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Jews and non-Jews alike, giving nineteenth-century Jews the sense that their own immediate past was appropriate material for art of the highest order. Similar claims can be made for Salomon Kohn’s historical novel Gabriel (1853), which—unlike most other Jewish historical fiction—enjoyed international success as well as particular popularity among the orthodox.92 Theoretically, of course, the orthodox novels of contemporary Jewish life were available to all, and the fact that this literature was designed with both adults and adolescents in mind made it particularly accessible, with Hebrew terms glossed and ample explanations of Jewish ritual given. In practice, though, it tended to be insular. Published by orthodox newspapers or book series catering to an orthodox public, this literature articulated visions of its aesthetic superiority in a vacuum, with minimal chance that counterclaims might emerge.93 In this sense, this fiction offers an extreme version of the dynamics we have explored in other contexts. As a form of minority culture, orthodox fiction bears little resemblance to the visions of radical and subversive “minor literatures” that populate much recent literary criticism.94 Orthodox fiction may indeed rewrite the “center” from the perspective of its “marginality.” In doing so, however, it makes little effort to engage in dialogue with mainstream literary life. Rather than seeking to reformulate categories of center and margin, this middlebrow fiction enshrines itself as the epitome of high culture in its own insular sphere, with grand gestures that were of little interest to the non-orthodox—and that would have alienated non-Jewish devotees of Schiller, Heine, and other classical writers. As a medium for acculturation, orthodox fiction provided its readers an ersatz form of secular culture with clear religious allegiances, literature that allowed and encouraged Jews to adapt to modernity while simultaneously celebrating orthodoxy’s triumph in the modern world. The tensions accompanying orthodox fiction’s celebration of itself have hardly proven to be stumbling blocks on the path to its success, and the unusually long shelf life that many of these novels and novellas have enjoyed clearly indicates an ongoing need that this literature has been able to fulfill. Nevertheless, in coming to terms with how orthodox fiction simulates secular culture for its readers, we will need to foreground some of the challenges that emerge in its appropriation of secular culture, examining situations in which this middlebrow fiction inadver-

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

tently chips away at its own vision of its aesthetic grandeur. In many cases, to be sure, orthodox fiction makes its borrowing from contemporary literature explicit in a manner entirely in keeping with its vision of itself. In Guggenheim’s Angela (1868–1869), Jeschurun offered its readers a multigenerational family saga that ends with a tearful reunion between a father and his long-lost daughter.95 Years earlier back in Italy, after the daughter’s Catholic nurse had secretly baptized her, the family arranged for her aunt Angela to flee with her and take the child to safety. Angela, disguised as a gypsy, ends up crossing the border into the German-speaking world but then falls ill. By chance she meets up with an orthodox couple, communicates with them that she is Jewish by saying the Shema, and then whispers “Grazie a Dio” before dying and leaving the child in their care. The only connection the child has to her past is a locket containing a picture of her mother that her father placed around her neck before she fled. In true Dickensian fashion—one thinks of Oliver Twist (1838), a work that was discussed in the orthodox press96—it is the locket that enables the reunion with her family. Angela thus presents orthodox Jews with a Dickensian narrative of their own, one that celebrates Jewish family and orthodox martyrs— but also one that lacks the Jewish villain Fagin whose antisemitic portrayal the orthodox, like other Jews, found troubling. In tales like this, orthodox fiction functions as a corrective to more mainstream literature, appropriating its plots and narrative devices but redirecting their allegiances so that they celebrate orthodox virtues and orthodox families. This certainly applies to Lehmann’s “Unmöglich,” where Louise Lindenstein’s husband finally moves beyond a life of disrespect for Jewish law only after a crew of pirates interferes with his plans to flee his creditors in Germany and captures him en route to Cape Town. During two years of captivity off the coast of Africa, Lindenstein develops remorse for his obsession with wealth and his lack of commitment to God, orthodoxy, and the family he has abandoned. In a scene reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—a novel that German authors rewrote over and over again from the eighteenth century on— Lindenstein then has a conversion experience and discovers God. As he explains to his wife and son when he meets them again at his father’s grave back in Germany, “I have become a different man. The sufferings

189

190

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

have improved me, have taught me to recognize God and to follow his holy commandments; I am now a Jew with head and hand, with heart and soul.”97 In this way, “Unmöglich” celebrates Lindenstein’s return to orthodoxy at the same time as it gives its readers an orthodox Robinsonade they can call their own. In other instances, however, appropriating models from non-Jewish belles lettres tended to call attention to the difference between original and imitation in a manner that threatened to undermine orthodox fiction’s visions of its own integrity and aesthetic value. Guggenheim’s novella “Aus der Gegenwart II” (1863–1864), for instance, introduces itself as a conscious reworking of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772), a classic example of “bourgeois tragedy,” the Enlightenment genre whose great innovation consisted in casting the domestic sphere of the nuclear family as the site for tragedy. Like Emilia Galotti, Guggenheim’s protagonist Aurelie Werner is seduced by a count and feels torn between her own attraction to the nobleman and her dedication to her virtuous father. And like Odoardo Galotti, Herr Werner too is largely absent. Aurelie and her mother meet the count while vacationing in the mountain town of B., which her banker father commutes to by rail on weekends, and her mother, a reader of fashion journals, is as obsessed with the nobility as Emilia Galotti’s mother Claudia. Like in Emilia Galotti, moreover, the father in Guggenheim’s novella also relates to his daughter through a portrait, with Aurelie described as having a “classical beauty” similar to Juno.98 “Aus der Gegenwart II,” however, hardly gives orthodox Jews a bourgeois tragedy of their own. Lessing’s text ends when Emilia begs her father to imitate the classical model of Virginius and to kill her so that her virtue and virginity will remain intact. After faltering, her father does as he is told and then indicts the prince for seducing his daughter. Guggenheim invokes this scene explicitly. At one point, when his daughter is sick, Herr Werner hopes that death will save her from the descent into ignominy that he knows the marriage with the count will entail. “A pagan father [Virginius] once thrust a dagger through his daughter’s heart to prevent less,” he comments, making an explicit reference to the passage Lessing’s heroine invokes.99 Ultimately, however, Aurelie recovers and runs off to marry her count, all of which makes it possible for this tragedy to end on a happy note, years later, when Aurelie sees the

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

light, leaves her philandering husband, and returns to her father so that she and her young son can live happily ever after as pious Jews. Lessing’s drama, a classic of the German stage, has provoked volumes of criticism about the complex conflict it portrays between a daughter’s desires and the will of her father, between sexual desire and patriarchal ideals of familial intimacy, and between the domestic intimacy of the bourgeois family and the power of the nobility.100 In adapting this tale to the needs of German-Jewish orthodoxy, Guggenheim does not just flatten out a pioneering tragedy to produce a Jewish family drama with an upbeat conclusion. She obliterates the ambivalence about patriarchy so central to Lessing. In Lessing, the father arguably appears as tyrannical as the absolutist prince, and the husband he has chosen for his daughter is described as an exact replica of the father. Lessing’s Emilia achieves some degree of autonomy by being the indirect author of her own suicide, and like in nearly all bourgeois tragedies, her father suffers the loss of a beloved daughter at the cusp of sexual maturity. Guggenheim’s Aurelie, however, lives happily ever after by ending up as the eternal daughter, with her own father generously acting as the father of her son: “You should not leave your son,” Herr Werner urges Aurelie, “for I will be his father and perform all the duties of a Jewish father where he is concerned. For even if his father is a Christian, the son of a Jewess is a born Jew, and even baptism cannot make him a Christian.”101 Lessing’s drama, like many bourgeois tragedies, opens up a complex and problematic relationship between the domestic realm of familial intimacy and the world outside. Guggenheim’s middlebrow novella draws self-consciously on Lessing to construct a melodrama where the bourgeois Jewish family ends up being all-inclusive, all-powerful, and all-healing, a world in which the orthodox father always knows best and always wins out in the end. “Aus der Gegenwart II” thus removes all the complexities that kept generations of Germans reading and performing Emilia Galotti, reducing Lessing’s well-known drama to a plot line in keeping with an unquestioned faith in orthodoxy. In its appropriation of a classical drama, Guggenheim’s decidedly non-tragic bourgeois tragedy thus unwittingly calls attention to the difference between Lessing and the fiction published in Jeschurun, and readers familiar with Lessing’s drama would hardly be well disposed to pronounce “Aus der Gegenwart II” the supe-

191

192

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

rior piece of literature. Thus, despite the constant invocation of a close alliance between orthodox fiction’s authentically Jewish content and its superior literary quality, this middlebrow literature at times betrays how derivative it is, and how much its appropriation of literary models is driven by a didactic agenda. Not all readers of Jeschurun’s fiction would have discerned this dynamic, and this alone may be telling in gauging orthodox fiction’s success in creating for its readers an effective simulacrum of secular fiction. But regardless of whether or not it was perceived by its readers, the tension that underlies so many of orthodox fiction’s borrowings from secular culture is a constitutive feature of the genre, central to the project to create middlebrow fiction dedicated to promoting orthodoxy. The message that orthodox fiction drives home again and again—that romantic love, filial piety, orthodoxy, and bourgeois family values all exist in perfect harmony with each other, able to withstand any and all threats from the outside world—hardly sits well with the complex reflections on gender, marriage, class, and power that are so characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature. Needless to say, there was never an orthodox Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary or even an orthodox Effi Briest. In the version of secular fiction that Jeschurun and Der Israelit presented their readers, a self-conscious embracing of orthodoxy becomes the panacea to all social ills, and the fundamental task facing young men and women is to embrace the religion of their forefathers with passion and commitment. When this happens, all else falls into place—without exception. Time and time again, to be sure, these tales present transgressions against orthodoxy and the patriarchal family, but in keeping with the iron-clad moral logic of melodrama, those who transgress are always properly punished or redeemed and brought back into the fold. A discussion of Lehmann’s short novel Gegenströmungen—a text that borrows even more heavily, and in an even more dubious manner, from mainstream fiction—can help wrap up our analysis of how orthodox fiction functions as middlebrow literature. First serialized in Der Israelit, Gegenströmungen was included in Lehmann’s often reprinted anthology Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, republished again in the orthodox book series Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei and translated into English as recently as 1982 with the title Between Two Worlds.102 In this multigen-

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

erational family saga, Lehmann tells two interweaving stories. The first deals with Josephine Wertheimer, a girl from a pious family who turns her back on Judaism to fulfill her dream of becoming a great opera singer. The second focuses on her son Heinrich, whom Josephine gives up as an infant to be raised by a former non-Jewish admirer of hers, a count who treats his adopted son with love and tenderness but conceals from him his Jewish origins. Heinrich, who through a chain of events accidentally comes into contact with Jews, eventually develops an intense passion for both Judaism and a Jewish woman. Ultimately, he rejects a marriage into the nobility so that he can live out his life as an orthodox Jew. Readers of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda will recognize this plot, and indeed, just four years earlier, in November 1876, Lehmann had devoted the lead article of Der Israelit to Eliot’s recently released novel.103 Lehmann, like many other German Jews of his generation, responded positively to Daniel Deronda.104 Praising Eliot for representing Judaism more authentically than any other non-Jewish author to date, he cast her fiction as a model that Jews too might want to emulate: “The main heroes of the novel are Jews, almost entirely noble, exemplary figures. It is supremely heartening to see such judgments about Jews and Judaism. Oh, if we were only to disseminate such ideas in our own circles, if we would only learn to value the great treasures that we possess.”105 Writing self-consciously as a non-Jew who respects Judaism from the outside, Eliot gives Jews a model of respect for Jewish tradition. The Jeschurun debates of the 1850s held that only the orthodox could produce authentically Jewish belles lettres; two decades later, Lehmann finds himself claiming the contrary, namely, that it is the work of a contemporary British novelist which provides an ideal medium for ensuring that the treasures of Judaism get passed on to the next generation. Given the hints of envy apparent in this enthusiasm for Eliot, it is hardly surprising that just four years later Lehmann took it on himself to rework Daniel Deronda into a piece of fiction that subscribed even more explicitly to Der Israelit’s ideals of what was authentically Jewish. In Gegenströmungen, like in Eliot’s novel, the bulk of the plot takes place when its hero is in his twenties, and the hero’s growing attraction to the mysterious world of Judaism goes hand in hand with his growing attraction to Hulda Wolf, a Jewish woman who has been an avid

193

194

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

reader of Der Israelit since early childhood. Here too the protagonist meets up with his mother, who has since left the stage and is living life as a member of the nobility in southern Europe, and he learns from her the secret of his parentage. Like Daniel Deronda, Lehmann’s Heinrich Wertheimer has a beautiful singing voice but no interest in a career on the stage, and the novel concludes with his conscious decision to embrace Judaism—and his marriage to the Jewish woman he has come to love. Lehmann makes numerous changes to the plot to adapt Daniel Deronda to the needs of modern orthodoxy. His novel opens, for instance, with a long account of Josephine’s tragic abandonment of orthodoxy, giving much more attention and space to the issue than Eliot does in her considerably longer novel. Josephine, like Deronda’s mother, is also the daughter of a single father who is committed to traditional Judaism, but Lehmann creates a new character, a reform-minded governess who leads Josephine astray and fuels her improper longing for a life of fame and fortune on stage. And rather than having Daniel and his bride Mirah set sail for Palestine at the end of the novel, Lehmann’s hero and his wife Hulda settle in Germany, becoming landowners on the Rhine, living a comfortable and pious life with their extended family. Nowhere in Lehmann’s novel is there a discussion of Jewish nationalism, and this is not the only major change in plot structure. By the end of Gegenströmungen, Josephine Wertheimer willingly and gladly renounces her noble titles and converts back to Judaism, and, following her rabbi’s advice, she dedicates her life and her not inconsiderable income to Jewish organizations in London that seek to prevent the activities of missionaries, hoping thereby to protect others from the “sins” which plague her “conscience.”106 Like Aurelie Werner, Elvire Metz, and the numerous other orthodox heroines who transgress, Josephine Wertheimer finds redemption by returning to the fold. In reworking Eliot to give his orthodox readers a Daniel Deronda narrative of their own, Lehmann obviously and explicitly shifts the focus, and as in Guggenheim’s reworking of Emilia Galotti, he does so in such a way as to call attention to what is at stake in creating middlebrow orthodox equivalents of revered works of secular culture. Lehmann does more than simply borrow and rework details from Eliot: he lifts entire scenes of Gegenströmungen directly from the pages of Dan-

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

iel Deronda, as the following example makes clear. Chapter 7 of Gegenströmungen is the first scene when we encounter Heinrich since reading about his birth and circumcision three months after his father’s death. Having learned in the preceding chapter of his mother’s successes at the Paris opera house, we find ourselves in Holstein, at the estate of Count Perleberg, where we meet Heinrich as a thirteen-year-old named Paul Weiland. Like Daniel Deronda, Heinrich knows nothing about where he comes from, and like Daniel—in a scene that copies almost verbatim from Eliot—his interest in his origins is piqued by reading: It is a lovely July afternoon. In a shady spot on the lawn a thirteenyear-old lad is resting, stretched out full length in the grass, his curly head supported on his arms, bent over a book, while his tutor is seated in a garden chair nearby, similarly occupied. The book which the boy is reading is Ranke’s History of the Popes. Suddenly he lets his left arm fall to the ground, peers at his tutor and asks: “Mr. Freimann, why was it that popes and cardinals always had so many nephews?” The tutor, obviously not pleased to be disturbed, replies: “Their own children were called nephews.” “Why?” asks the lad. “It was a matter of suitability, for Catholic priests are not permitted to marry.” Mr. Freimann’s eyes are on his book again, while the lad, Paul Weiland is his name, turns back to his tutor, deeply hurt. He had always called Count Friedrich Perleberg “Uncle,” and when it once occurred to him to ask about his father and mother, the count had replied: “You lost both father and mother when you were still very young; therefore I am taking care of you.” Paul did not dare to ask further questions. Life with an indulgent and friendly uncle was indeed wonderful for the boy.107

In Daniel Deronda, the corresponding passage reads: [A] boy of thirteen, stretched prone on the grass where it was in shadow, his curly head propped on his arms over a book, while his tutor, also reading, sat on a campstool under shelter. Deronda’s book was Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics:—the lad had a passion for history, eager to know how time had been filled up since the Flood, and how things were carried on in the dull periods. Suddenly he let down his left arm, and looked at his tutor, saying in purest boyish tones—

195

196

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

“Mr. Fraser, how was it that the popes and cardinals always had so many nephews?” The tutor, an able young Scotchman who acted as Sir Hugo Mallinger’s secretary, roused rather unwillingly from his political economy, answered with the clear-cut, emphatic chant which makes a truth doubly telling in Scotch utterance— “Their own children were called nephews.” “Why” said Deronda. “It was just for the propriety of the thing; because, as you know very well, priests don’t marry, and the children were illegitimate.” He had always called Sir Hugo Mallinger his uncle, and when it once occurred to him to ask about his father and mother, the baronet had answered, “You lost your father and mother when you were quite a little one; that is why I take care of you.” . . . And at that time he did not mind about learning more, for he was too fond of Sir Hugo to be sorry for the loss of unknown parents. Life was very delightful for the lad, with an uncle who was always indulgent and cheerful.108

This is not the only section of the text cribbed from Eliot. A subsequent conversation in Eliot between Deronda and Sir Hugo about a career on the stage appears practically verbatim in Gegenströmungen as well.109 Weiland’s mother, like Deronda’s, was also brought up by a single father and eventually married her first cousin, only to lose both her father and husband, freeing her up for a life on the stage. Like Deronda, Weiland too has once overheard someone say he bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother, and there are numerous other instances of Lehmann echoing Eliot’s phrasing. The point is not to put Lehmann on trial for his liberal appropriation of Eliot. The fact that a nineteenth-century orthodox rabbi seems to have composed one of his most enduring novels with Eliot’s masterpiece open on his desk is important less in itself than because of what it says about the relative insularity of the world created by orthodox fiction. Given the prominent attention that Lehmann himself gave Eliot in Der Israelit, one might think that others in the orthodox world might have picked up on how closely his rewriting of Daniel Deronda followed the original. Daniel Deronda was released in a German translation the same year as Lehmann reviewed its English publication,110 and with her

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

sustained interest in things German, Eliot had a considerable following in the German-speaking world. Nowhere in Gegenströmungen, however, does Lehmann make any explicit reference to Daniel Deronda. He clearly released this novel as part of his own oeuvre, as but the latest in the increasing number of orthodox novels of contemporary GermanJewish life. Even the 1982 English edition of this frequently reprinted novel fails to note that Gegenströmungen rewrites a classic of British literature. The book jacket for this edition notes instead that “Rabbi Lehmann would have been gratified to know that his stories, which delighted Jewish readers throughout Germany, are now being read by countless 20th century readers across the face of the globe. These new, unabridged translations of his stirring and exciting tales will provide fascinating and absorbing reading for new generations throughout the English speaking world.”111 Feldheim, the Jewish publishing house that produced this translation of Gegenströmungen, makes no reference in its publicity material to any of Lehmann’s non-Jewish models, and no reference to the extent to which this tale modeled itself on literature that is fairly well known in the English-speaking world. In borrowing so heavily from Daniel Deronda, Gegenströmungen obviously undermines any vision of its own aesthetic grandeur, since it is so evidently a middlebrow imitation of Eliot’s classic. However, the astonishing fact remains that this novel seems not to have appeared as such to the thousands and thousands of readers who Jon Lehmann claimed devoured his father’s fiction and identified with his heroes and heroines. Regular readers of Der Israelit would certainly have heard of Daniel Deronda, but the complete lack of attention to Lehmann’s appropriation of Eliot seems to indicate that these individuals were more likely to have read Lehmann’s version of Daniel Deronda than the original it pilfered from. In this sense, orthodox fiction obviously constituted a form of middlebrow culture that was highly derivative of contemporary literature. Yet rather than being an index of its failure, the close proximity between Lehmann and Eliot—or between Guggenheim and Lessing—was part of this culture’s success in launching a genre of literature that might become a functional substitute for more secular belles lettres.

197

198

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy The consolidation of German-Jewish orthodoxy in the second half of the nineteenth century helped launch a collective that was more fiercely concerned with its boundaries than other segments within German Jewry. Whatever route local communities took, the legal battles over the creation of separatist orthodox communities that came to a head in the 1870s called special attention to hierarchical models of relating to the remainder of the Jewish world that clearly set the orthodox apart from others.112 Orthodox fiction is important here because it deals so explicitly with the question of multiple identities, giving us a window into the dynamic and multifaceted processes by which boundaries could be maintained at the same time as multiple allegiances were being negotiated. These fictions of contemporary life—to repeat a point we have made in other contexts—may not reveal much about the social coordinates of German-Jewish collective life. But our analysis of this body of literature does help foreground, once again, what many social historians have not, namely, the important role that literature could play in imagining German-Jewish social relations, the vital function that literature could assume in promoting a community of Jews dedicated at one and the same time to the ideals of orthodoxy and to modern culture. The middlebrow fiction we have been considering, of course, was neither the only nor the most important medium for transmitting the values of a self-consciously modern form of GermanJewish orthodoxy. It was, however, among the most modern and the most novel, particularly when it came to its constant borrowings from and reworkings of secular belles lettres. Indeed, as we have seen, orthodox fiction was profoundly dependent on other forms of contemporary literature over which it routinely pronounced its moral and aesthetic superiority. This close kinship with secular belles lettres was key to its success in creating Jewish fictions that might function as effective substitutes for more secular forms of contemporary literature. Clearly, to underscore an argument we have made in previous chapters, our analysis of this body of literature has hardly revealed a subculture that was fatefully blind to itself and to the mechanisms by which it appropriated secular culture. Rather, as we have seen, orthodox fiction carefully, consciously, and constantly defined itself in relation to domi-

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

nant visions of Bildung and high culture, giving rise to a form of middlebrow literature that was strategically crafted to resemble the secular forms of belles lettres it sought to improve on. And for the thousands of readers who have taken these texts seriously as literature to be read and enjoyed, the orthodox novels of contemporary life that emerged in the mid- to late-nineteenth century are important because they succeeded in these efforts to re-create secular culture for an orthodox milieu—because these middlebrow fictions both looked and read like great literature yet were clearly produced with an orthodox readership in mind. A consciousness of boundaries and distinctions is not the same as erecting walls, and if German-Jewish orthodoxy can be characterized as a subculture, it was a highly porous one. When it came to belles lettres, orthodox Jews hardly limited themselves to orthodox fiction. Breuer points out that by the 1890s, “at the latest, the subscribers to the Israelit had developed into an eager reading public that did not miss a new German literary publication.”113 The body of literature we have been studying here is important because it was consumed alongside other, more mainstream literature, because it sought to supplement rather than supplant more secular fiction, because its readers read texts by Lehmann, Guggenheim, and others alongside the works of Schiller, Heine, and others whom these texts typically criticized. As Breuer has noted, the ideal of a “clearly demonstrable identity” between Judaism and secular culture that Samson Raphael Hirsch upheld in his theoretical writings was particularly difficult to maintain in practice. Hirsch himself, Breuer writes, “seemed to overlook the essentially secular nature of German Idealism and to seek its presumed identity between humanistic culture and divinely revealed Judaism where it did not really exist. . . . The ties of Idealism and liberalism to religion were, after all, loose, and if they existed at all, they were emphatically Christian.”114 David Ellenson has argued, similarly, that German-Jewish orthodoxy’s vision of a “successful synthesis . . . between Jewish tradition and German culture” succeeded best precisely when the orthodox “did not too closely examine or reflect on their efforts” to wed traditional Judaism to modern culture. This synthesis was important not so much because it was “logical” but rather because it “inhere[d] in the doing,” that is, because it appeared to work in practice.115 The orthodox were not alone, of course, in insisting on unique partnerships between their conceptions of Jewish

199

200

Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

tradition and the best in modern culture, and from the late eighteenth century on, such claims of special affinities between Judaism and secular culture inevitably provoked opposition.116 Orthodox fiction is important in this context because it used the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction to create a world in which Judaism and German culture could and did exist in perfect harmony, a world that envisioned the German-Jewish circumstances of the present in such a way that commitments to Jewish orthodoxy became the stuff of great art. And these novels, not surprisingly, are full of non-Jews who express the deepest respect for Jews who maintain fidelity to the religion of their forefathers.117 This middlebrow literature, to be sure, may never have appealed to Ludwig Geiger or reached a mainstream audience, but this was precisely its strength. Orthodox writers created a forum in which they could produce the great German-Jewish novel without the presence of naysayers—or without anxiety that fans of George Eliot might raise their voices to protest against this literature’s claims to greatness and originality. This sense of identity between orthodox Judaism and German culture may have been a fiction, but that was precisely the point: through reading such literature, orthodox Jews could experience a harmony between Judaism and secular culture that may have proved elusive in other realms. In this sense, despite its obviously subordinate position in Jewish life, belles lettres proved to be a crucial medium for the production of a self-consciously modern orthodoxy, an essential tool in sustaining a brand of Jewish orthodoxy that could pride itself on its absolute compatibility with modern culture.

Concluding Remarks

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, it would have been easy enough for a Jewish reader in Central Europe or North America to get his or her hands on a copy of a piece of fiction distributed by the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur such as Rahel Meyer’s 1865 novel In Banden frei. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, finding a personal copy of Meyer’s magnum opus did not prove much more complicated. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, a well-worn copy of In Banden frei arrived on my doorstep in the spring of 2007, less than two weeks after I located it in an antiquarian book store in Freiburg im Breisgau, a university town in southwest Germany. As soon as I opened up the book, however, I discovered that this copy of Meyer’s novel had its own circuitous history. On its inside cover, the book bore the label of a lending library in Belgard owned by a certain W. Müller. Belgard, known today as Białogard, is a town in a region of northwestern Poland that was a province of the German Empire in the late nineteenth century. After World War II, this area became part of Poland, and exactly how the book got from Belgard/Białogard to Freiburg is a mystery. The name of yet an earlier owner—Gustav Hirschfeld, Belgard—stamped on the title page of the novel raised even further questions about the book’s history. Unlike the names I found scribbled in many of the copies of books discussed in the previous chapters, Hirschfeld was not an unknown. One of Imperial Germany’s premier classical archaeologists, Hirschfeld was born in 1847 to a Jewish merchant family in the nearby town of Pyritz (Pyrzyce). He studied with the celebrated archaeologist Ernst Curtius in Berlin, directed the German excavations at Olympia in the 1870s, and eventually was called to Königsberg to accept a major professorship

201

202

Concluding Remarks

in 1877.1 When Meyer’s novel was published, Hirschfeld would have been eighteen and about to set off for his studies in Berlin—the perfect demographic for this type of literature. Given what we know about his subsequent life, however, it is hardly surprising that his copy of Meyer’s novel ended up in a lending library. Certainly, once Hirschfeld converted to Christianity in 1877—the same year as his appointment to the professorship—a book so fiercely committed to Judaism like Meyer’s In Banden frei might have held limited interest to him. But perhaps he abandoned the book much earlier. Or perhaps a Jewish family member held on to it for a generation or so before selling or donating it to W. Müller’s lending library. Apart from its intrinsic interest, the uncertain history of my copy of In Banden frei is significant because it underscores how difficult it is to reconstruct the impact that German-Jewish literature had on the readers who were its obvious targets. Once I finished the work on this book, I moved my copy of In Banden frei to its permanent home on bookshelves that house my own German-Jewish heirlooms, the numerous handsomely produced sets of the collected works of Lessing, Kant, Schiller, and Goethe that I inherited from my maternal grandparents after they passed away in the early 1990s. My American-born grandparents inherited these books from their parents and grandparents, who continued to nurture attachments to German high culture long after they left behind their native towns and villages in Posen (Poznan), Bavaria, Hungary, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe to find a new life across the ocean. My grandmother grew up in New York City in the first two decades of the twentieth century with two native-born American parents. For her, German was still the required language at the dinner table and at gatherings of the extended family, and Goethe’s Faust was a book that one spent a summer vacation in the Adirondacks studying with one’s father. Among these German books that came into my possession more than fifteen years ago, there was an ample supply of religious material, prayer books in German and Hebrew, works on Jewish history, and samplings of rabbinic literature in German. The treasured books passed down from generation to generation until they landed on my bookshelves in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, however, did not include any of the titles discussed in the pages of this book— none of the publications of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen

Concluding Remarks

Literatur, no nineteenth-century Jewish newspapers, no historical fiction, and not even a single ghetto tale. Much of what I have aspired to do in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity is to reconstruct a vibrant literary culture whose traces have typically been obscured by the collections of the complete works of Goethe and Schiller like those that I was so fortunate to inherit. Of course, as I noted in the Introduction, most acts of reading leave no concrete traces behind, and tellingly, the state of the bindings of the books that I inherited seems to indicate that at least some of these books were displayed more than they were actually read. Certainly, the fact that the only reading material I inherited from my paternal grandparents are a set of 1914 Passover Haggadot published by the Hebrew Publishing Society hardly serves as evidence that my Lithuanian-born great-grandparents led lives that were not shaped in any way by reading fiction. The fact remains, however, that historians have had a much easier time documenting German Jews’ often conspicuous consumption of high culture than recognizing the significance of the vast body of popular belles lettres that German-Jewish print media made it their mission to disseminate as widely as possible from the late 1830s on. Part of the reason for this may be that when it came to the standards of literary taste enshrined in the nineteenth century, GermanJewish belles lettres simply could not measure up to the newly minted classics of the Age of Goethe that became icons of bourgeois culture throughout those areas of Central and Eastern Europe where German commanded prestige as the language of culture. Shulamit Volkov, in fact, has commented that because of the linguistic ease that Jews had participating in mainstream literary culture, German Jewry inevitably lost its most exceptional talents to the broader cultural scene.2 At the same time, however, we may want to be wary of projecting our own standards of what it means to have great literary talent onto the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century. We have seen throughout this book that German-Jewish fiction was widely disseminated, reviewed, discussed, and reprinted throughout the nineteenth century. Jewish readers often acknowledged that they were reading literature that was of limited appeal to non-Jews, and in this sense German-Jewish belles lettres inevitably lacked the level of prestige that leather-bound complete sets of Goethe and Schiller bestowed on their owners. But

203

204

Concluding Remarks

contemporary Jewish commentators were also insistent that GermanJewish belles lettres was in no way intrinsically inferior to the emergent classics of modern German culture. From the perspective of the German-Jewish newspapers, periodicals, magazines, and book series we have been studying, German-Jewish literature was not a clearinghouse for mediocre talents. It represented instead the beginning of a great literary tradition. Of course, the fact that much of this literature has faded into oblivion may give rise to skepticism about its dreams of grandeur. But the fundamental project that emerged in nineteenth-century Germany to invest belles lettres with the task of ensuring the next generation’s continued fidelity to Judaism lives on, and in many ways it is stronger than ever. On a general level, one might turn to Nextbook, a prominent American Jewish cultural organization created in 2004 that publishes a book series, organizes lectures and readings, publishes an online and a print magazine, and offers weekly podcasts on Jewish culture. Nextbook proudly presents itself as a critical and iconoclastic voice in Jewish life. In this sense, despite its claims to be a non-denominational, non-partisan organ of contemporary Jewish life, thought, and culture—a modern-day Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, as it were—it clearly marks a departure of sorts from the legacy of middlebrow fiction. A better and considerably less highbrow example of the persistence of the phenomenon we have been studying in this book might be contemporary best-selling Jewish fiction like that of Naomi Ragen, an American-born writer who lives in Israel and whose novels have sold millions in English and numerous other languages. Many of Ragen’s concerns, to be sure, differ considerably from the world of German-Jewish middlebrow fiction. Her ongoing effort to expose domestic violence in the haredi community and her self-conscious attempt to combine feminism with a commitment to orthodox Judaism clearly depart from the celebration of the patriarchal cult of domesticity we routinely encountered in German-Jewish literature. On the other side of the spectrum, Ragen’s squarely right-wing politics hardly seem the heir to nineteenth-century German Jewry’s typical love affair with liberalism. Nevertheless, the function that her fiction seeks to fulfill for its readers seems very much a continuation of what we have encountered in the chapters of this book.

Concluding Remarks

Ragen’s best-selling 1998 epic novel, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, for instance, tells the story of Catherine da Costa, a wealthy New Yorker of Sephardic background raised in London. Pronounced terminally ill by her doctor, Catherine is deeply troubled that her two twenty-something granddaughters neither have an interest in the family’s illustrious history nor maintain any commitment to Judaism whatsoever. At the beginning of the novel, Catherine is paid a visit by the novel’s title figure, the ghost of her ancestor Hannah Mendes, a historical figure who survived the Spanish Inquisition—and a figure who was the aunt of the famed Joseph Nasi, whom we encountered in Ludwig Philippson’s “Die drei Brüder” (1854) in Chapter 1. Inspired by her ancestor, whom she knows through the fragments of her manuscripts, Catherine sends her granddaughters off on a tour of Europe to search for Hannah Mendes’s papers and to connect with the noble tragedies and triumphs of their own Sephardic past. The wise matriarch manages to set things up so that both granddaughters fall passionately in love with Jewish, and indeed, Sephardic men. Ultimately, these independent, strong women come to recognize the great truth that “marriage is more than mutual desire—it is a partnership in which every member of the family, living and dead, takes part.”3 Toward the end of the novel, after journeying through London, Spain, Gibraltar, and Venice, they too encounter the ghost of Hannah Mendes. And she manages to teach them that “if a person is part of a family, the spirit is housed anew in another body each time a child builds his home as a branch of his parents’. In this way, every father and every mother, every grandfather and every grandmother, goes on living in children and grandchildren.”4 When Catherine da Costa dies, just before the end of the novel, she has already seen one granddaughter happily married to the doctor she loves at the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue in New York. At the very end of the novel, her other granddaughter finally comes around and sets off to London to marry the Sephardic man of her dreams, the British manuscript hunter who enabled these descendants of Hannah Mendes to reconnect with her legacy. Readers of The Ghost of Hannah Mendes can put down the novel confident that Catherine’s two granddaughters are carrying on the noble legacy of their Jewish ancestors. Very much in the tradition of the ro-

205

206

Concluding Remarks

mance novels we encountered in Chapter 3, then, Ragen’s tightly constructed novel renders romantic love inextricable from falling in love with Judaism itself. Harry Walker, the agency that books Ragen for lecture tours, claims that The Ghost of Hannah Mendes brings “the fascinating and little-studied world of the conversos and their descendants back to life as a model for Jewish continuity.”5 Nevertheless, our investigation into German-Jewish fiction about the Sephardic legacy makes it possible to recognize Ragen’s strategy as part of a tried and tested literary tradition. Certainly, Ragen, an orthodox writer, might be familiar with a novel like Marcus Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar, which appeared in English in 1958 and 1983 and in numerous postwar Hebrew translations. But speculations about influence are beside the point. Ragen’s readers—and unlike Lehmann she has had enormous crossover appeal—likely do not see her fiction through the lens of its nineteenthcentury precursors. Nevertheless, Ragen does precisely what Lehmann and Philippson did with the legacy of Spanish Jewry. She mines the Sephardic past for its melodramatic potential, creating a world in which virtuous conversos triumph over evil inquisitors, demonstrating a passionate commitment to Jewish identity in such a way as to inspire modern readers to follow in their footsteps. Naomi Ragen has a huge fan base in the United States and elsewhere, and a quick visit to her website reveals numerous critics and readers who hail her as one of the great Jewish writers of her generation.6 Nevertheless, I cannot help imagining that my own German-Jewish ancestors might be a bit taken aback to have their cherished collected works of Goethe and Schiller discussed alongside the work of such a popular novelist, and one whose appeal seems, for better or worse, to be limited primarily to women. Our esteemed professor of classical archaeology in Königsberg might similarly be surprised to find a book that was formerly in his possession—and a book that claimed to represent the great Jewish Bildungsroman—being compared to Ragen’s best-selling novels in any context. But in a sense, that is precisely my point. German Jews were hardly just the “German Jews Beyond Judaism” commemorated so effectively by George Mosse. Nor were they simply a subculture that sought to wed Jewish religious tradition to European high culture in innovative ways that proved paradigmatic for the modern Jewish ex-

Concluding Remarks

perience. German-speaking Jews were pioneers when it came to creating a tradition of popular Jewish belles lettres invested with the task of ensuring Judaism’s survival in the modern world. And in this respect, much Jewish fiction today may be more the heirs of the German-Jewish experience than contemporary commentators often acknowledge.

207

Notes

Introduction 1.  Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Defining the Indefinable: What is Jewish Literature?” in What Is Jewish Literature? ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994), 3–12. See also Dan Miron’s recent study, Verschränkungen. Über jüdische Literaturen, trans. Liliane Granierer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). 2.  Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 38–71, also Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: The Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 1–3. 3.  See Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Beginning of Integration, 1780–1970,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 127–29. 4.  Bilder aus dem Altjüdischen Familien-Leben nach Original-Gemälden von Moritz Oppenheim, Professor, Mit Einführung und Erläuterungen von Dr. Leopold Stein (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag von Heinrich Keller, 1882), n.p. 5.  Oppenheim here anticipates a crucial argument that has been made of late concerning the role of women’s reading in Jewish modernization. See Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004). 6.  See Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk, eds., Moritz Daniel Oppenheim: Die Entdeckung des jüdischen Selbstbewusstseins in der Kunst / Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art (Cologne: Wienand, 1999), especially the essay by Andreas Gotzmann, “Traditional Jewish Life Revived: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Vision of Modern Jewry,” 232–50. For Oppenheim scholarship today, Ismar Schorsch’s seminal essay, “Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation,” originally published in Moritz Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983), 31–61, remains an important point of departure. 7.  On the importance of Kompert and other ghetto novelists for Oppenheim, see Schorsch, “Art as Social History,” also the chapter on “Nostalgia and the ‘Re-

209

210

Notes turn to the Ghetto,’” in Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 154–85. 8.  A comprehensive history of the German-Jewish press has yet to be written. See, however, Margaret T. Edelheim-Muehsam, “The Jewish Press in Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 1 (1956): 163–76; Jacob Toury, “Die Anfänge des jüdischen Zeitungswesens in Deutschland,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 10 (1967): 93–123; David J. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Barbara Suchy, “Die jüdische Presse im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik,” in Juden als Träger bürgerlicher Kultur in Deutschland, ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Stuttgart, 1989), 167–91. Recent scholarship, building on Sorkin’s productive notion of a “German-Jewish subculture,” has made tremendous strides in studying the diverse forms and functions of the German-Jewish press. See Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 442–504; Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte. Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen (Bremen: edition lumière, 2008); and Michael Nagel, ed., Zwischen Selbstbehauptung und Verfolgung. Deutsch-jüdische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften von der Aufklärung bis zum Nationalsozialismus (Hildesheim: Olms, 2002). 9.  On the Institut, see Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 71–78, also Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837– 1922) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), 153–64. 10.  All research in this field inevitably builds on both Horch’s analysis of the literary criticism of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur and Itta Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986. I owe a special debt to Dr. Shedletzky for sharing a copy of her dissertation with me. Florian Krobb’s interpretations of seminal pieces of German-Jewish literature in his Selbstdarstellungen. Untersuchungen zur deutschjüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999) remain a crucial springboard for all work in the field. 11.  Ludwig Philippson, “Dr. Phöbus Philippson,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 34, no. 17 (April 26, 1870): 341–44, here 343. 12.  Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 13.  “Die Erbbibel, Novelle, aus dem Französischen der Eugenie Foa,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 1, nos. 99, 100, 107, 112, 115 (1837). In 1838, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums serialized a fragment of Jean Czynski’s Le Roi des paysans, and the paper published another piece of fiction by Czynski, Sara Grinberg, in 1849. 14.  See Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino

Notes Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), here 60, also Olga Boravaia, “The Role of Translation in Shaping the Ladino Novel at the Time of Westernization in the Ottoman Empire,” Jewish History 16 (2002): 263–82. 15.  On early Anglo-Jewish fiction, see Michael Galchinsky, The Origins of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), also Nadia Valman, The Jewess in NineteenthCentury Literary Culture (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16.  See, for instance, Miron, A Traveler Disguised. Ruth R. Wisse’s monumental The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey Through Language and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) focuses almost entirely on the twentieth century. Miron’s Verschränkungen. Über jüdische Literaturen, cited above, offers a much more differentiated account of the situation, even though he writes off the literature that is the subject of the present study as mediocre products of writers with modest talent (78–79). Finally, Jeremy Dauber’s Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) situates the rise of modern Jewish literature also considerably before the 1880s. 17.  Nitsa Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit. Der deutsch-jüdische historiche Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer jüdischen Nationalliteratur, trans. Dafna Mach (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006). 18.  George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 19.  For background on Bildung beyond Mosse’s argument, see the seminal analysis in Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, also Aleida Assmann, Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee (New York: Campus Verlag, 1993). 20.  Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, 2–3 21.  On the role of these debates in shaping Jewish self-perceptions and on Jewish interventions in these debates, see Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 22.  Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry. 23.  Quoted in Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism, 14. 24.  See, for instance, Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 56–58; Klaus L. Berghahn and Jost Hermand, eds., Goethe in GermanJewish Culture (Rochester: Camden House, 2001). 25.  See Hainer Plaul, Illustrierte Geschichte der Trivialliteratur (Hildesheim: Olms, 1983); the chapter on “The Development of Popular Literature in Germany” in Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 19–44; Alberto Martino, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek. Geschichte einer literarischen Institution (1756–1914) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990); Hainer Plaul and Ulrich Schmid, “Die populären Lese-

211

212

Notes stoffe,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5, Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (Munich: Hanser, 1998), 313–38; and Norbert Bachleitner, Kleine Geschichte des deutschen Feuilletonromans (Tübingen: Narr, 1999). On these questions, classic studies such as Rudolph Schenda’s two monographs, Volk ohne Buch. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe 1770– 1910 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1970) and Die Lesestoffe der kleinen Leute. Studien zur populären Literatur im 19. und 20. Jarhhundert (Munich: Beck, 1976), and Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser. Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500–1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974), are still of value. 26.  Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 283. Many of the essays collected in this volume, including the one I quote here, appeared in Volkov’s essay collection, Das jüdische Projekt der Moderne. Zehn Essays (Munich: Beck, 2001). 27.  For an intelligent review of recent scholarship, see Till van Rahden, “Jews and the Ambivalences of Civil Society in Germany, 1800–1933: Assessment and Reassessment,” Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 1024–47. 28.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 29.  Till van Rahden, “Weder Milieu noch Konfession. Die situative Ethnizi-tät der deutschen Juden im Kaiserreich in vergleichender Perspektive,” in Religion im deutschen Kaiserreich, ed. O. Blaschke and F. M. Kuhlmann (Gütersloh, 1995), 415– 50. On this issue, see also van Rahden, Juden und andere Breslauer. Die Beziehungen zwischen Juden, Protestanten und Katholiken in einer deutschen Großstadt von 1860 bis 1925 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000), now available in English as Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925, trans. Marcus Brainard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). 30.  On eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views of “high” versus “low” culture, see Christa Bürger, Peter Bürger, and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, eds., Zur Dichotomisierung von hoher und niederer Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982); Christa Bürger, Peter Bürger, and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, eds., Aufklärung und literarische Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980); Jochen SchulteSasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung. Studien zur Geschichte des modernen Kitschbegriffs (Munich: Fink, 1971); and Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 31.  Peter Nusser, Trivialliteratur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991). 32.  Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 47. 33.  See, in addition to Purdy, George Williamson’s pioneering work on the literary giant August von Kotzebue, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–

Notes 1819,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 890–943, and Karin Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780– 1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). 34.  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). In a recent book that draws productively on Bourdieu, Simone Lässig explores the extent to which German Jews negotiated their entry into the middle class by the accumulation of “cultural capital.” See Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. 35.  Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 56–58. 36.  Jonathan S. Skolnik, “’Who Learns History from Heine?’ The GermanJewish Novel as Cultural Memory and Minority Culture, 1824–1953,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999, here 92, also Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History at 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, ed. Nicholas Vaszonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 227–38, and “Writing Jewish History between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction,” Prooftexts 19 (1999): 101–25. 37.  On melodrama in nineteenth-century literature, see Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), and Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds., Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), particularly the essay by Lothar Fietz, “On the Origins of the English Melodrama in the Tradition of Bourgeois Tragedy and Sentimental Drama: Lillo, Schroder, Kotzebue, Sheridan, Thompson, Jerrold,” 83–101, originally published in German in the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 65 (1991): 99–116. The literature on film and melodrama is too vast to survey in this context. See John Mercer and Martin Shingler, Melodrama: Genre, Style, Sensibility (London: Wallflower, 2004). 38.  See Jonathan M. Hess, “Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski’s Werther the Jew and Its Readers,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005): 202–30. 39.  Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). See also Jaime Harker, America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and Middlebrow Authorship between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), and Gordon Hunter, “In the Middle: Fiction, Borders, and Class,” CR: The New Centennial Review 1, no. 2 (2002): 89–108. For productive adaptations of the concept of the middlebrow to nineteenth-century literary culture in Germany, see Katrin Völkner, “Books for a Better Life: Publishers and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture in Wilhelmine Germany,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2001, also Brent Peterson, History, Fiction, and Germany: Writing the Nineteenth-Century Nation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 23–24.

213

214

Notes 40.  Friedrich Hebbel, Briefwechsel 1829–1863, ed. Otfrid Ehrismann, Henry Gerlach, Günter Häntzschel, Hermann Knebel, Hargen Thomsen (Munich: Iudicium, 1999), 5 vols., here vol. 2: 544, 41.  As Deborah Hertz reminds us in her recent study, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), conversion had its own forms of complexity. For the generation of German Jews following those whom Hertz studies in her book, however, crafting and maintaining a distinct German-Jewish identity was a concern that often made this complexity difficult to appreciate. I return to this issue in Chapter 4, in my discussion of the critique of Rahel Varnhagen in Rahel Meyer’s In Banden frei (1865). On Auerbach, see Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 140–55. For Sorkin, Auerbach’s avoidance of explicitly Jewish themes in his fiction and his emergence as the best-selling author of the Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten are emblematic of the German-Jewish subculture’s blindness to its own internal dynamics. 42.  Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class; Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995); Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 43.  See Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), Margaret Stieg Dalton, Catholicism, Popular Culture, and the Arts in Germany, 1880–1933 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), Jutta Osinski, Katholizismus und deutsche Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993), and Susanne Schmidt, “Handlager der Vergänglichkeit.” Zur Literatur des katholischen Milieus 1800–1950 (Paderborn: Schöningh 1994). 44.  For exemplary discussions of turn-of-the-century German-Jewish literature in this regard, see Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 45.  See Philipp Theissohn, Die Urbarkeit der Zeichen. Zionismus und Literatur— eine andere Poetik der Moderne (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), also Mark H. Gelber, Melancholy Pride: Nation, Race, and Gender in the German Literature of Cultural Zionism (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000). 46.  See David A. Brenner, “Reconciliation Before Auschwitz: The Weimar Jewish Experience in Popular Fiction from the Israelitsiches Familienblatt,” in Evolving Jewish Identities in German Culture: Borders and Crossings , ed. Linda Feldman and Diana Orendi (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 45–61, now also David A. Brenner, German-Jewish Popular Culture Before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (London: Routledge, 2008).

Notes

Chapter 1 1.  J. C., “Phöbus Philippson. Ein Erinnerungsblatt zu seinem hundertsten Geburtstag,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 71, no. 30 (July 26, 1907): 354–55. For biography, see Johanna Philippson, “The Philippsons, a German-Jewish Family, 1775–1933,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 7 (1962): 95–120, esp. 99–101, also Meyer Kayserling, Ludwig Philippson. Eine Biographie (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1898), and Norton David Shargel, “Ludwig Philippson: The Rabbi as Journalist. An Anthology of His Writings with an Introductory Essay,” Ph.D. diss, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990. 2.  J. C., “Phöbus Philippson,” 354. 3.  Ludwig Philippson, “Dr. Phöbus Philippson,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 34, no. 17 (April 26, 1870): 341–44, here 343. 4.  See Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837–1922) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985); Jonathan S. Skolnik, “’Who Learns History from Heine?’ The German-Jewish Novel as Cultural Memory and Minority Culture, 1824–1953,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999, here 7, 22–107; Florian Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen. Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999), 29, and Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien, Wunschautobiographien: Marranenschicksal im deutsch-jüdischen historischen Roman (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 38, 51; Gabriele von Glasenapp, “Identitätssuche ohne Modell. Geschichte und Erinnerung im jüdisch-historischen Roman des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Judentum und Historismus. Zur Entstehung der jüdischen Geschichtswissenschaft in Europa (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003), 203–31; and Nitsa Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit. Der deutsch-jüdische historiche Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 17–34. 5.  Obviously, as I mentioned in the Introduction, this represents just one of many such starting points. As Maurice Samuels has noted in his pathbreaking work on French-Jewish fiction, Eugénie Foa inaugurated a French-Jewish tradition of historical fiction with her La Juive (1835), which appeared immediately in German translation. See Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in NineteenthCentury France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Michael Galchinsky has also argued for the priority of Anglo-Jewish developments in his pioneering study, The Origins of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 6.  In addition to appearing in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums in 1837 and the first volume of the original, two-volume version of Saron (Magdeburg: Falkenberg, 1843), vol. 1: 1–151, Die Marannen appeared in Saron. Zweite, gänzlich umgestaltete und vermehrte Ausgabe (Leipzig: Leopold Schnauß, 1855), Erster Theil: Novellenbuch, vol. 1: 3–124. This later edition was frequently republished between 1855 and 1870. Die Marannen appeared in Yiddish in 1894, in English in 1875 and

215

216

Notes 1898, and in Hebrew in 1859 and 1875, with a verse version in 1879. Interestingly enough, the initial American version did not acknowledge Philippson’s authorship in the least: The Marannos: A Tale of the Inquisition, During the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella: (Spain’s Most Eventful Era), translated from the Spanish by J. H. Carey (San Francisco: M. Weiss, 1875). The 1898 version listed Ludwig Philippson as the author: Ludwig Philippson, The Marannos: A Novel (Philadelphia: Press of the Levytype, 1898). According to the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, Bernard Bertensohn translated Die Marannen into Russian in 1847. 7.  Both Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” and Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien, offer overviews of this genre that go well into the twentieth century. 8.  Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 71–92, originally published in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 47–66. See also, more recently, Carsten Schapkow’s essays, “al-Andalus und Sepharad als jüdische Gedächtnisorte im Spiegel der Emanzipation der deutschsprachigen Juden,”Transversal 1 (2004): 80–99; “Die deutsch-jüdische Presse der Haskalah und das iberisch-sephardische Vorbild der Maskilim,” in Deutsch-jüdische Presse und jüdische Geschichte. Dokumente, Darstellungen, Wechselbeziehungen, ed. Eleonore Lappin and Michael Nagel (Bremen: edition lumière, 2008), vol. 1: 111–27; and “The Debate on Sephardic Jewry in German-Jewish Literature in the 19th Century,” in Flâneries littéraires sépharades. Lisbone, Paris, Istanbul. Les sépharades en littérature. Un parcours millenaire, ed. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue (Paris: Iberica Press 2004), 193–202. 9.  Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” 71. 10.  All of these figures became the subject of German-Jewish historical fiction. See, for instance, Ludwig Philippson’s Hispania und Jerusalem. Novelle aus dem zwölften Jahrhundert, serialized in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1848–1849, republished in vol. 2 of Saron and subsequently translated into Polish, Ladino, and Hebrew; M. Dessauer, Maimonides. Historische Erzählung, serialized in 1881 in the Populär-wissenschaftliche Monatsblätter zur Belehrung über das Judentum für Gebildete aller Confessionen; Ludwig Philippson, “Die Abenteuer eines Pilgers,” published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt in 1854–55 and reprinted in vol. 5 of Saron. Abarbanel figures centrally in Die Marannen and elsewhere. See 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 Fuellner (Stuttgart: Metzler 1998), 322–33. 11.  Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien. 12.  See Michael Galchinsky, “Modern Jewish Women’s Dilemmas: Grace Aguilar’s Bargains,” Literature & Theology 11, no. 1 (March 1997): 27–45, as well as the section on Aguilar in Galchinsky, The Origins of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer, 135–90. 13.  See, for instance, studies as diverse as David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580–1700 (Philadelphia: Uni-

Notes versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Elaine Marks, Marrano as Metaphor: The Jewish Presence in French Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). Given its pejorative connotations, the term Marrano is often avoided by historians, who typically prefer to speak of New Christians, conversos, or crypto-Jews and explore the wide range of possible identities and forms of religious consciousness that the historical experience of converts and their descendants brings to the foreground. As will become clear in the course of my discussions in this chapter, however, nineteenth-century German Jews tended to use the term Marrano widely, and at times without pejorative associations. Given that my main concern here is with the fiction that emerged from such interests, I too use the term Marrano throughout the chapter. 14.  [Lehmann,] “Eine Seder-Nacht in Madrid,” Der Israelit 9, nos. 49–52 (December 2–December 23, 1868), 911–12, 931–32, 951–52, 957–58, here 911. “Eine Seder-Nacht in Madrid” was republished in 1894, under Lehmann’s name, as a free gift to subscribers of Der Israelit. 15.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado. Geschichtlicher Roman aus der zweiten Hälfte des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1867), 97. 16.  Ph. M. Philippson, “Die Vertreibung der Juden aus Spanien und Portugal. Historische Skizze aus den Zeiten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin 1 (1834): 115–28, 373–91, here 381. On Abarbanel’s biography, see Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 1–26. 17.  Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen, in Saron, vol. 1: 3–124, here 124. Philippson noted in his essay in the Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin that the historical Abarbanel did make a stop at Corfu, but only before moving on to Venice. As Krobb points out in Kollektivautobiographien, Philippson uses the term Marrano in an extremely, perhaps overly, inclusive sense as a designation for all Spanish Jews, both those who converted to Christianity and those who did not. 18.  J. C., “Phöbus Philippson,” 354–55. 19.  Ludwig Philippson, “Dr. Phöbus Philippson,” 343, 344. 20.  For background on this and what follows, see Hainer Plaul and Ulrich Schmid, “Die populären Lesestoffe,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5, Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (Munich: Hanser, 1998), 313–38; the chapter on “The Development of Popular Literature in Germany” in Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers By Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 19–44; and especially Hainer Plaul, Illustrierte Geschichte der Trivialliteratur (Hildesheim: Olms, 1983); and Alberto Martino, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek. Geschichte einer literarischen Institution (1756– 1914) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990). The reference to the edition of Novalis

217

218

Notes costing sixty pounds of beef is from King, Best-Sellers by Design, 22. 21.  See Martino’s magisterial volume, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek, for detailed information about the holdings of German lending libraries. Goethe was the fourteenth most popular author in the period from 1815–48, with Wieland coming in at seventeen, and Schiller ranked thirty-sixth. See ibid., 276. On eighteenth- and nineteenth-century views of “high” versus “low” culture, see Christa Bürger, Peter Bürger, and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, eds., Zur Dichotomisierung von hoher und niederer Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), also Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung. Studien zur Geschichte des modernen Kitschbegriffs (Munich: Fink, 1971). In recent years, scholars of German literature have begun to move beyond this rigid dichotomy and its dismissive attitude toward popular culture and take eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular literature seriously as an object of study. See, for instance, Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), also George Williamson, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 890–943, and Karin Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780–1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). 22.  See the biography of Ludwig Philippson by his son-in-law, Kayserling, Ludwig Philippson, 9, also Ludwig Philippson, “Aus meiner Knabenzeit VI,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 51, no. 51 (December 22, 1887): 813–14. 23.  Ludwig Philippson, “Aus meiner Knabenzeit VI,” 813. 24.  See Norbert Bachleitner, Kleine Geschichte des deutschen Feuilletonromans (Tübingen: Narr, 1999). 25.  See Ph. M. Philippson, “Die Vertreibung der Juden aud Spanien und Portugal.” 26.  See Karl Goedeke, Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung aus den Quellen (Leipzig: L. Ehlermann, 1998), vol. 6: 409, also Fritz Barnstorf, “August Leibrock, der Liebling der Leihbibliotheken oder Leserfreuden beim Talglicht,” Freundeskreis des Großen Waisenhauses Braunschweig 43 (1965): 14–18. 27.  Aug. Leibrock, Der Cardinal. Eine spanische Inquisitions-Geschichte (Leipzig: Christian Ernst Kollmann, 1824), 2 vols. 28.  Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 35. The Monk appeared in German just one year after its English premier: Der Mönch, trans. Friedrich von Oertel (Leipzig, 1797). 29.  See, for instance, Ulrike Hönsch, Wege des Spanienbildes im Deutschland des 18. Jahrhunderts. Von der Schwarzen Legende zum “Hesperischen Zaubergarten” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), or Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 30.  Martino, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek, 276–88. 31.  See Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 102–6. Scott’s own portrayal of Rebecca, as Nadia Valman has recently argued, is considerably more am-

Notes bivalent. See Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 20–34. And as Jefferson Chase has contended, German writers often gave Rebecca’s exclusion from the emergent national community a positive reading in their rewritings of Scott’s plot line. See Chase, “The Homeless Nation: The Exclusion of Jews in and from Early Nineteenth-Century German Historical Fiction,” in The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914, ed. Nadia Valman and Bryan Cheyette (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2004), 61–74. 32.  Martino, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek, 276–78. 33.  Washington Irving, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada by Fray Antonio Agapida, intro. Earl N. Harbert, ed. Miriam Shillingsburg (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 4, 292. 34.  See the chapter, “Writing Spanish History: The Inquisition and ‘the Secret Race’” in Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 127–73, here 139. 35.  Edward Peters, “Jewish History and Gentile Memory: The Expulsion of 1492,” Jewish History 9, no. 1 (1995): 9–34, also Ragussis Figures of Conversion, 127– 73. As Helen Rawlings points out, much of the information about the Inquisition that came out of Spain in the early modern period came from Spanish Protestant exiles. Rawlings, The Spanish Inquisition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 4–5. 36.  Leibrock, Der Cardinal, vol. 2: 47–48. 37.  Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen, 81–82. 38.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 360–72. 39.  Kayserling, Ludwig Philippson, 212. Published in German as part of the program of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur in 1867 and again as part of Philippson’s Gesammelte Schriften in 1891 (Breslau: Schlesische Buchdruckerei 1891), Jakob Tirado was also translated into Dutch (Rotterdam, 1868), Hebrew (Vilna, 1874, 1881; Krakow, 1907; Tel-Aviv, 1940), and Yiddish (Warsaw, 1924, 1925, 1927). 40.  The Vale of Cedars was originally published as Marie Henriquez Morales, trans. J. Piza (Oldenburg: Schmidt, 1856) and included four years later in the lists of the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, again as Marie Henriquez Morales (Magdeburg : Albert Falckenberg, 1860). Piza’s translation was repackaged in the early twentieth century as Das Cedernthal (Prague: J. B. Brandeis, 1900, rpt. 1910), Jüdische Universal-Bibliothek, vols. 81–82. 41.  Die Familie Y Aguillar was released in 1892 as a Gratis-Beilage to the Israelit; published as vols. 9–11 in Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei, a 62–volume orthodox book series published by Kauffmann in Frankfurt am Main from 1897 to 1912; and published again in Sänger & Friedberg’s jüdische Volksbücher für Jung und Alt, vols. 2–3 (Frankfurt am Main: Sänger & Friedberg, 1922). One of Lehmann’s most enduring and popular works, it is still available in English, German, and Hebrew and has appeared over the years in Hebrew (1895, 1949, 1955, 1965, 1966, 2001–2002), English (1958, 1983), Spanish (published in Argentina in the 1900s), and Yiddish (as late as 1987).

219

220

Notes 42.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die drei Brüder,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 1 (1854): 53–55, 57–59, 61–63, 65–67, 77–78, 93–95, 97–99, published originally under the pseudonym Ludwig Schragge, later in Saron, vol. 5: 215–65. I quote “Die drei Brüder” below according to the original version published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt. 43.  [Ludwig Philippson,] “Literarischer Wochenbericht,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 23, no. 36 (August 29, 1859): 513–14, here 514. 44.  Robert Eduard Prutz, “Stellung und Zukunft des historischen Romans,” in Prutz, Kleine Schriften zur Politik und Literatur (Merseburg: Louis Garcke, 1847), vol. 1: 279–91, here 279. See also Hartmut Eggert, Studien zur Wirkungsgeschichte des deutschen historischen Romans 1850–1875 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1971). 45.  King, Best-Sellers by Design, 30–31. 46.  Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 47.  Philippson, Saron, iii–iv. The above passage was included in the preface to the first edition (1843) and reprinted in subsequent editions as well. 48.  Leibrock, Der Cardinal, vol. 2: 202. 49.  Ad. v. Zemlinsky, “Die Rache des Juden. Historische Erzählung aus dem Mittelalter,” Der Israelit 15, nos. 37–47 (1874). Zemlinsky was the father of the composer and conductor Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871–1942). For background, see Anthony Beaumont, Zemlinsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 8–10. 50.  Zemlinsky, “Die Rache des Juden,” 1066. 51.  Ibid., 1065. 52.  See, for instance, “Schuld und Sühne. Erzählung aus dunkler Zeit,” Der Israelit 15 (1874), issues 50–52, continued in Der Israelit 16 (1875), issues 1–11. 53.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 368. 54.  Dr. M., “Magdeburg, 13. April,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 22, no. 18 (April 26, 1858): 245–46, here 246. 55.  Marie Henriquez Morales, trans. J. Piza (Magdeburg : Albert Falckenberg, 1860), 233. On the function of Sir Arthur for British readers of the novel, see Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 141–48. 56.  Dr. M., “Magdeburg, 13. April,” 245. 57.  J. Piza, preface to Marie Henriquez Morales (Oldenburg: Schmidt, 1856), quoted according to Dr. M., “Magdeburg, 13. April,” 246. The 1860 edition of Marie Henriquez Morales does not include the entire preface. 58.  Almost sixty years later, the prolific writer Regina Neisser, in an article commemorating Aguilar’s 100th birthday in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, counted Aguilar among the “most poetic and graceful figures of world literature,” praising her for works that are widely read and admired by Jews and non-Jews alike “not just in her fatherland and in America but also in Germany—in magnificent translation.” See Neisser, “Zum Andenken einer Frühvollendeten. Grace Aguilar. Zur 100. Wiederkehr ihres Geburtstages,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Juden-

Notes tums 80, no. 23 (June 19, 1916): 271–72, here 271. 59.  On the close links between Aguilar and Scott and Aguilar’s attempts to rewrite and rework Scott’s Ivanhoe, see Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, 141–48. 60.  Grace Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr (Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006), 30–31. 61.  Ibid., 175. 62.  Ibid., 177. 63.  Interestingly enough, Aguilar makes no mention whatsoever of Islamic Spain in this context, and the only point when it does come up is when Ferdinand, Isabella, Marie’s husband, and others talk about the Moorish presence as the “blot upon a kingdom otherwise as fair and great as any other European land” (ibid., 61). 64.  Ibid., 177. 65.  Ibid., 45, 24, 50. 66.  See on this issue the discussion of The Vale of Cedars in Valman, The Jewess, 103–9. 67.  Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars, 33. 68.  Ibid., 147. 69.  Ibid., 177. 70.  Ibid., 223. 71.  Ludwig August Frankl, “Geschichte Diego de Aguilar’s,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 18 (1854): 630–34, 656–61, here 660–61. Frankl’s essay offers a fairly comprehensive account of the various urban legends circulating about Diego d’Aguilar in the mid-nineteenth century. Zemlinsky, whose fiction Lehmann published in Der Israelit in the early 1870s (and whose “Die Rache des Juden” we discussed above), deals at length with D’Aguilar in the official history of the Sephardic community in Vienna he wrote a decade later: Adolf von Zemlinszky, Geschichte der türkisch-israelitischen Gemeinde zu Wien von ihrer Gründung bis heute nach historischen Daten (Vienna: Papo, 1888), bilingual edition with Ladino translation by Michael Papa. My thanks to Michael Silber for his help on this matter. 72.  Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars, 257, 259. 73.  See “Das jüdische Volksblatt,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 18, no. 42 (October 16, 1854): 525–26, here 526. 74.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die drei Brüder,” 54. 75.  Ibid., 53. 76.  Ibid., 99. 77.  Ibid., 57. 78.  Ibid., 99. 79.  Ibid., 63. 80.  Meyer Kayserling, Sephardim. Romanische Poesien der Juden in Spanien. Ein Beitrag zur Literatur und Geschichte der Spanisch-Portugiesischen Juden (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1859), 165; Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Leiner, 1907), vol. 9: 458–64.

221

222

Notes 81.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die drei Brüder,” 67. Philippson claims in a footnote to this section of the text that his tale is largely historical, drawn from a recent work by Carmoly (65n). This gesture is important nevertheless largely because of its legitimating function within his historical fiction. Graetz too draws on Carmoly (Geschichte der Juden, vol. 9: 359), creating a twenty-page account of the Duke of Naxos that indicates a historiographical context that Philippson’s 1854 story— which was republished in Saron in 1863—was very much at odds with. 82.  In 1853, for instance, several months before “Die drei Brüder” was published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt, E. Pellisier reported large groups of armed Jewish warriors living exactly like Arabs: “Dans la région du Sers, on rencontre un nombre assez considérable d’Israélites vivant exactement de la même vie que les Arabes, armés et vêtus comme eux, montant à cheval comme eux et faisant, au besoin, la guerre comme eux. Ces Juifs sont tellement fondue avec le reste de la population qu’il est impossible des les en distinguer.” See Pellisier, Description de la Régence de Tunis (Paris, 1853), 186, quoted according to Paul Sebag, Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie. Des origines à nos jours (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1991), 113. I owe special thanks to Norman Stillman for both this reference and his help on this matter. 83.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die drei Brüder,” 99. 84.  Ibid., 97–98. 85.  Dr. M., “Magdeburg, 13. April,” 246. 86.  See Ludwig Philippson’s Hispania und Jerusalem; Dessauer, Maimonides; Ludwig Philippson, “Die Abenteuer eines Pilgers,” all cited above. 87.  Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” here 92, also Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction,” Prooftexts 19 (1999): 101–25, and Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History at 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, ed. Nicholas Vaszonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 227–38. 88.  Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 102. 89.  Lehmann, Die Familie Y Aguillar, Der Israelit 14 (1873): 530–31. This passage is discussed by Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 102, also by Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien, 85. 90.  Lehmann, Die Familie Y Aguillar, 135. 91.  On Lehmann as an orthodox John Grisham, see Gaby Wenig, “All-Female Plays Fill Niche for Frum,” Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (February 27, 2004), at www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=11865. 92.  My argument here builds decisively on Skolnik, who also discusses the way German-Jewish historical fiction engages with the classics of the German stage, draws on melodrama, and makes ample use of middlebrow clichés. Skolnik too discusses the way these ingredients of the German-Jewish historical novel come together in creating models of bourgeois female virtue. Apart from many of its particulars, my analysis differs from Skolnik in foregrounding both how these

Notes various elements of the German-Jewish historical novel end up being in productive tension with each other and how works of German-Jewish historical fiction at times ended up being at odds with the canonical works of literature they drew on. 93.  Kayserling, Sephardim, esp. 165–70. On de Barrios, see Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 18–24, also Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: Littman, 2000), 167–71. Graetz later perpetuates the same legends in his Geschichte der Juden, vol. 9: chap. 13, 439–72. 94.  Kayserling, Sephardim, 176–77. For a somewhat more recent account that corrects many of Kayserling’s errors, see L. D. Barnett, “Two Documents of the Spanish Inquisition,” Jewish Quarterly Review 15 (1924): 213–39. 95.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 49–52. This scene, incidentally, is echoed in Lehmann’s Die Familie Y Aguillar, where Diego y Aguillar, raised by Dominicans since childhood, pays a similar visit to the synagogue in Toledo and makes identical discoveries of a forgotten and idyllic Jewish childhood. See Lehmann, Die Familie Y Aguillar, 500. 96.  Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 23. 97.  Ibid., 18–24, also Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans, 167–71. 98.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 286–87. 99.  See, for instance, Hansjürgen Blinn, ed., Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland (Berlin: Schimdt, 1982–1988), 2 vols., or Simon Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586–1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 100.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 280, 271. 101.  Ibid., 98. 102.  Ibid., 286–88. 103.  Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 107. 104.  As Bodian notes, the historical Marie Nunes did make it to Amsterdam but then lost both her husband and her brother, who both decided to return to Spain and to Catholicism (Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 24–25). 105.  Ludwig Philippson, Jakob Tirado, 80, 307, 319. 106.  On this issue, see Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995) and, most recently, Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). Skolnik makes somewhat analogous comments here, although his apt description of Marie Nunes as a “paragon of passive virtue” who stands in “for an imagined female reading public which would uphold the new religious and family principles of the bourgeois age” (“Who Learns History from Heine?” 107) tends to stress the passivity of Philippson’s female lead at the expense of the (albeit) limited forms of agency she achieves. 107.  The literature on Lessing and bourgeois tragedy is too broad to survey in

223

224

Notes this context. See Gail K. Hart, Tragedy in Paradise: Family and Gender Politics in Bourgeois Tragedy, 1750–1850 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996), Bengt Algot Sørensen, Herrschaft und Zärtlichkeit. Der Patriarchalismus und das Drama im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1984), or Karl Guthke, Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980). 108.  B. Saphra, “Unsere Erzähler. Ludwig Philippson,” Ost und West 4, no. 12 (1904): 819–30, here 829. 109.  On Marlitt, see Todd Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation, 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183–201, also Kristin Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 130–36. 110.  See, for instance, Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 223–62. 111.  Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen, 57 112.  Ibid., 57, 58, also 33. 113.  Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 106 114.  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti, in Lessing, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Karl Lachmann (Berlin: Voss, 1838), vol. 2: 114–89, here 187. 115.  See Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, and Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany. 116.  Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen, 7. 117.  Ibid., 11. Later on, in conversation with Don Isaac Abarbanel, in an expression of extreme filial piety, Dinah explains that she owes everything that she knows to her father, who made her education the calling of his life; ibid., 39. 118.  Ibid., 17. 119.  Ibid., 18–19. 120.  Ibid., 66. 121.  Ibid., 102. 122.  Ibid., 101–3. 123.  Ibid., 114. 124.  Ibid., 120. 125.  Ibid., 123. Interesting enough, the 1875 American version of the text—the version that claimed be a translation of a Spanish original—changed the ending of the novella significantly, concluding with Dinah marrying Judah, with Don Isaac’s blessings. We are told in this version of the text that the couple would often “feelingly talk together of the noble character and disinterested love of the Christian Captain, Alonzo” (94). The 1898 version of the text follows the ending of Philippson’s original. 126.  [Ludwig Philippson,] “Ueber die Grundsätze der Redaction,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 1, nos. 41, 47, 53, 65, 73, 92, 95 (1837): 161–62, 185–86, 209–10,

Notes 257–58, 290–91, 366–67, 378–79, here 161–62. 127.  Ibid., 257. 128.  Ibid., 257–58. 129.  Ibid., 367, emphasis in the original. 130.  Jonathan M. Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 222–32. 131.  Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 107–16. 132.  See Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit. Ben-Ari here—as in her essay, “1834 [sic] 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, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 143–51—tends to view German-historical fiction from the perspective of the forms of national Jewish literature it later helped launch rather than situating it within nineteenth-century German Jewry’s concerns with developing and fostering multiple identities.

Chapter 2 1.  Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” in From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), 71–92, originally published in Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989): 47–66. 2.  The last two decades have seen a resurgence of interest in both Kompert and ghetto fiction. See M. Theresia Wittemann, Draussen vor dem Ghetto. Leopold Kompert und die “Schilderung jüdischen Volkslebens” in Böhmen und Mähren (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), also Florian Krobb, “Reclaiming the Location: Leopold Kompert’s Ghetto Fiction in Post-Colonial Perspective,” in Ghetto Writing: Traditional and Eastern Jewry in German-Jewish Literature from Heine to Hilsenrath, ed. A. Fuchs and F. Krobb (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999); Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen. Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000), 89–100; Bradley F. Abrams, “Bookends of Bohemian Jewish Identity: Leopold Kompert and Fritz Mauthner,” Bohemia 33 (1992): 282–98; Anne Fuchs, “Mimicry und Assimilation: Leopold Komperts Ghettogeschichte in postkolonialer Perspektive,” in Das schwierige neunzehnte Jahrhundert, ed. J. Barkhoff, G. Carr, and R. Paulin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000); Eva Lezzi, “Tradition oder Akkulturation? Liebeskonflikte in der Ghettoliteratur von Leopold Kompert,” in Fremdes Begehren. Transkulturelle Beziehungen in Literatur, Kunst und Medien, ed. E. Lezzi and M. Ehlers (Cologne, 2003), and Lezzi, “Kulturelle Identitätskonstruktionen und transkulturelle Erotik. Imaginationen osteuropäischer Ghettos in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Zwischen Sprachen. Strategien jüdischer Selbstbehauptung, ed. M. Brocke, T. Kollatz, and G. Pelger (Berlin, 2007); Wilma A. Iggers, “Leo-

225

226

Notes pold Kompert, Romancier of the Bohemian Ghetto,” Modern Austrian Literature 6 (1974): 117–38; and Thomas Winkelbauer, “Leopold Kompert und die böhmischen Landjuden,” in Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. H. O. Horch and H. Denkler (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988), 2, 190–217. On German-language ghetto fiction in general, see Gabriele von Glasenapp, Aus der Judengasse. Zur Entstehung und Ausprägung deutschsprachiger Ghettoliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), also Kenneth H. Ober, Ghettogeschichte. Entstehung und Entwicklung einer Gattung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001). Any further work on ghetto tales and its reception will be unable to ignore Gabriele von Glasenapp and Hans Otto Horch, eds., Ghettoliteratur. Eine Dokumentation zur deutsch-jüdischen Literaturgeschichte des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), which unfortunately came to my attention after this chapter was completed. 3.  Itta Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland 1837–1918,” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986. 4.  See Kompert’s statements quoted in Karl Emil Franzos, “Ueber A. Bernstein,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 59 (1895): 259–61, here 260. 5.  Ludwig Geiger, “Jüdische Erzählungsliteratur,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 71 (1907): 78–82. 6.  See, for instance, Dan Miron, “The Literary Image of the Shtetl,” Jewish Social Studies 1 (1995): 1–43, and David G. Roshkies, “The Shtetl in Jewish Collective Memory,” in The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 41–66. 7.  On Weill and Stauben, see the chapter on “Nostalgia and ‘The Return to the Ghetto,’” in Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 154–85, but particularly Maurice Samuels, Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Some of Weill and Stauben’s tales were in fact published in French-Jewish periodicals before Kompert’s first volume appeared in 1848, even though they never attained the same sort of international reputation as Kompert’s fiction later did. As I mention below, starting in 1846, Kompert too also published early versions of some of the tales in Aus dem Ghetto in Jewish periodicals. 8.  Seth L. Wolitz, “The Americanization of Tevye or Boarding the Jewish Mayflower,” American Quarterly 40 (1988): 514–36. 9.  See Fuchs and Krobb, “Writing the Ghetto,” in Fuchs and Krobb, eds., Ghetto Writing, 1–2. 10.  See, for instance, Joel Müller, “Leopold Kompert als jüdischer Geschichtsschreiber,” Populär-wissenschaftliche Monatsblätter zur Belehrung über das Judenthum für Gebildete aller Confessionen 8 (1888): 193–96, 217–20, 249–51, 265–73, here 219. Müller, who taught rabbinic Judaism at the Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, originally gave this speech in Berlin on July 18, 1887. I cite

Notes further examples of this tendency to insist on the historical value of Kompert’s fictional ghettos below. 11.  Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 12.  Cohen, Jewish Icons, 154–85, also, for an analogous discussion, Paula E. Hyman, “Traditionalism and Village Jews in Nineteenth-Century Western and Central Europe: Local Persistence and Urban Nostalgia,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. J. Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992). 13.  On the importance of Kompert and other ghetto novelists for Oppenheim, see Ismar Schorsch, “Art as Social History: Oppenheim and the German Jewish Vision of Emancipation,” in Moritz Oppenheim: The First Jewish Painter (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1983), 31–61, also Cohen, Jewish Icons, 154–85. 14.  Lehmann, “Aus dem Ghetto. Geschichten von Leopold Kompert. Leipzig, 1848,” Der Orient 9 (1848): 469–74, here 469. 15.  See my lengthier discussion of Lehmann’s writings in 1847–48 in “Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German-Jewish Ghetto Fiction,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 4 (2007): 576–615, esp. 576–77. 16.  On Lehmann, see Emil Lehmann, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: H. S. Hermann, 1899), also Robert Liberles, “Emancipation and the Structure of the Jewish Community in the Nineteenth Century,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 31 (1986): 51–67, esp. 64. 17.  Lehmann, “Die deutschen Juden vor und in fünfzig Jahren,” in Lehmann, Gesammelte Schriften, 344–55, also my discussion in “Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia,” 577–78. 18.  Lehmann, “Aus dem Ghetto,” 470. 19.  Ibid., 469, See also [Lehmann,] “Kompert,” Jüdisches Athenäum. Gallerie berühmter Männer jüdischer Abstammung und jüdischen Glaubens von der letzten Hälfte des achtzehnten, bis zum Schluss der ersten Hälfte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Grimma and Leipzig: Druck und Verlag des Verlags-Comptoirs, 1851), 118–19. 20.  A certain H. G. makes this comment in the context of a review of Rahel Meyer’s In Banden frei, Illustrirte Monatsschrift für die gesamten Interessen des Judenthums 2, no. 1 (October 1865): 62–65, here 63. 21.  Lehmann, “Aus dem Ghetto,” 473–74. 22.  The dynamic Lehmann identifies in Kompert is hardly unique to Kompert. See Jonathan Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History between Gutzkow and Goethe: Auerbach’s Spinoza and the Birth of Modern Jewish Historical Fiction,” Prooftexts 19 (1999): 101–25. As Skolnik notes, Auerbach in his preface to his historical novel Spinoza (1837) also put forth a notion of German-Jewish minority literature as enacting the end of the ghetto. There are, of course, significant differences between such historical fiction and the nostalgia for the ghetto in writers such as Kompert, as Skolnik notes, ultimately portraying Spinoza not as a nostalgic “literature about the ghetto . . . as much as a literature of the ghetto, of a society in which incom-

227

228

Notes plete secularization and radical secularization push a secular Jewish culture to the margins as well” (118). Both genres, however, share a similar sense of the agency of German-Jewish literature. 23.  See Peter Fritzsche, “How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity,” in The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture, ed. Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 62–85. Fritzsche’s essay argues, instead, that nineteenth-century nostalgia be seen as a perceptive and productive mode of historical consciousness. 24.  [Ludwig Philippson,] “ Das jüdische Volksleben,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 14 (1850): 497–98. 25.  See, on Kompert, particularly Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen, and Wittemann, Draussen vor dem Ghetto. 26.  See Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). In a recent book that draws productively on Bourdieu, Simone Lässig explores the extent to which German Jews negotiated their entry into the middle class by the accumulation of “cultural capital.” See Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004). 27.  See Wittemann, Draussen vor dem Ghetto. Like Wittemann, I too concentrate on Kompert’s tales as agents of cultural memory. My focus, however, is as much on the tales themselves as on the way their reception assigned them this function, and in this context, I pay considerably more attention to formal and aesthetic questions than does Wittemann. In this sense, my discussion parallels that of Krobb, who insists on seeing Kompert’s ghettos as “imagined locations,” “literary spaces” for the projections of “imaginary ideals.” See Krobb, “Reclaiming the Location,” here 50, also Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen, 89–100. In many ways, my discussion of Kompert in this chapter is much closer to some of the very fine recent scholarship on Moritz Daniel Oppenheim. See, Cohen, Jewish Icons, cited above, also the essays in Georg Heuberger and Anton Merk’s exhibition catalogue, Moritz Daniel Oppenheim. Die Entdeckung des jüdischen Selbstbewusstseins in der Kunst / Jewish Identity in 19th Century Art (Cologne: Wienand, 1999). Of the essays in the Heuberg/Merk volume, Andreas Gotzmann’s “Traditional Jewish Life Revived: Moritz Daniel Oppenheim’s Vision of Modern Jewry” (232–50) is of particular relevance for my analysis. Gotzmann argues persuasively that Oppenheim’s cycle not be interpreted as a conservative return to the religious traditions of his youth but instead as the crafted performance, before a bourgeois audience, of German Jewry’s allegedly bourgeois past. 28.  See Hillel J. Kieval, “The Social Vision of Bohemian Jews: Intellectuals and Community in the 1840s,” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 246–83, also Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Notes 29.  See Kompert’s statements quoted in Karl Emil Franzos, “Ueber A. Bernstein,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 59 (1895): 259–61, here 260, also Arne Koch, “Local Voices of Poetic Realism: Nineteenth-Century Regional Literature and the Paradox of German Identity, 1842–97,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001, now in a revised book form, Between National Fantasies and Regional Realities: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006). 30.  Leopold Kompert, quoted according to Karl Emil Franzos, “Leopold Kompert,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 9 (1906): 147–60, here 154–55. This essay originally appeared in the December 3, 1886, Morgenblatt edition of the Neue Freie Presse. 31.  See, for instance, Adolf Neustadt, “Leopold Kompert. Biographische Skizze,” in Libusa. Jahrbuch für 1860, ed. Paul Aloys Klar (Prague, 1860), 349– 76, here 369–70; Eduard Kulke, “Leopold Kompert: Eine Studie,” Illustrirte Monatshefte für die gesamten Interessen des Judenthums 1 (1865): 345–55, 429–45, here 442. 32.  Neustadt, “Leopold Kompert,” 370. 33.  Auerbach, “Vorreden spart Nachreden,” in Auerbach, Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart, 1863), vol. 1: vii–xi. Auerbach’s preface, written in 1842, was published in 1843 in the journal Europa. 34.  Franzos, “Leopold Kompert,” 151. More recent criticism echoes these claims. In their introduction to Ghetto Writing, Krobb and Fuchs note that Kompert’s tales “are written from a position of exteriority: they are sentimental in Schiller’s sense of the word in that they give expression to the ghetto primarily as a poetic space recollected through distance” (5). 35.  Kompert, “Die Kinder des Randars,” in Kompert, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Gerschel, 1882), vol. 1: 82–237. 36.  Kompert, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: 150. 37.  Ibid., 237. 38.  “Wo ist des Juden Vaterland?” is the title of chapter 7 (ibid., 148–56). 39.  Lehmann, “Aus dem Ghetto,” 351. 40.  Kompert, “Der Dorfgeher,” in Kompert, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2: 9, 1–54. 41.  Kompert, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2: 54. 42.  Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen, 93; W. G. Sebald, “Westwärts—Ostwärts: Aporien deutschsprachiger Ghettogeschichten,” Literatur und Kritik 233/234 (1989): 161–89. 43.  Kompert, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2: 54. 44.  Neustadt, “Leopold Kompert,” 354. 45.  Philippson, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 12 (1848): 512–13. 46.  Ludwig Geiger, “Jüdische Erzählungsliteratur,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 71 (1907): 78–82. 47.  Brian Vick, Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and

229

230

Notes National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), esp. 83–109. 48.  “More Fiction,” The Nation 62, no. 1615 (June 11, 1896): 458–59. 49.  H. Sutherland Edwards, “Kompert’s Jewish Tales,” Fortnightly Review 32 (1882): 156–73, here 157. 50.  George Saintsbury, “New Novels,” Academy: A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, and Art 22 (1882): 217–18. 51.  Hieronymus Lorm, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung (1861), 436, quoted according to Constant von Wurzbach, “Leopold Kompert,” in Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich 12 (1864): 405–10, here 409–10. Lorm, born Heinrich Landesmann, was a well-known and prolific Austrian poet and philosopher with Moravian Jewish roots. In his career as a writer, however, his Jewish roots played a minimal role at best, and his review is important here because he was so immersed in general German literary life. In an obituary for Lorm in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, Gustav Karpeles relates how Lorm made clear to him in that he had no interest in writing for Jewish papers. See Karpeles, “Hieronymus Lorm: Ein Nachruf,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 66 (1902): 593–95. And this was not just a Jewish perception. Constant von Wurzbach presents his review as part of a general consensus that Kompert is a great Austrian writer—not as a Jewish voice. 52.  Review in Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, quoted according to Wurzbach, “Leopold Kompert,” 408–9. The author of this review uses the term “orthodox” as a synonym for traditional. 53.  Robert Gieseke, review in “Das Literatur-Beiblatt” of Die Donau no. 215 (1855), quoted according to Wurzbach, “Leopold Kompert,” 409. 54.  Wurzbach, “Leopold Kompert,” 410. 55.  See, for instance, in addition to the reviews discussed in this section, Ludwig Philippson, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 12 (1848): 512–13. 56.  Ferdinand Kürnberger, “Literarische Charaktere,” Gesammelte Werke, ed. Otto Erich Deutsch (Munich: Georg Müller, 1911), vol. 2: 383–403, here 388–89, 403. Kürnberger’s review was first published in the September 10, 1848, edition of the Sonntagsblätter. 57.  Betty Paoli, “Erzählungen—Leopold Kompert und Marie v. Ebner-Eschenbach,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Helen Bettelheim-Gabillon (Vienna, 1908), 60– 78, here, 62–64. Paoli’s essay is reprinted from the Beilage zur Augsburger Allgemeinen Zeitung, May 1875. 58.  Saint-René Taillandier, “Le roman juif en allemagne,” Revue des deux mondes, 28 anée, nouvelle période, tome treizième (1852): 5–32, also Taillandier’s review of Kompert’s novel Am Pflug, “Le romancier du ghetto et l’émancipation des juifs de Bohème,” Revue des deux mondes, XXVIe anée, seconde période, tome premier (1856): 277–309. For the enthusiastic Jewish response to such reviews, see, for instance, ——ky, “Leopold Kompert und die ‘Revue des deux Mondes,’” Wiener Mittheilungen. Zeitschrift für israelitische Cultur-Zustände 4, no. 9 (February 25, 1856), n.p., or Neustadt, “Leopold Kompert,” 372.

Notes 59.  Taillandier, “Le roman juif en allemagne,” 17–18, 28–30, 22, 29–30. 60.  Kompert, “Eine Verlorene,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2: 55–219. 61.  Kompert returns to this theme in his 1855 novel, Am Pflug. On the question of “regeneration,” see Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 62.  Helen Zimmern, “Romances of Leopold Kompert: Pictures of Jewish Home-Life,” Appleton’s Journal 10, no. 60 (1881): 559–69, here 559, 569, 562, 561, 565. 63.  Kompert, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: 9, 38. 64.  Henry Wasserman, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 23 (1978): 47–60. See also, for further context, Kristen Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). 65.  Wasserman, “Jews and Judaism in the Gartenlaube,” 55 66.  Die Gartenlaube 33 (1886): 903–4. 67.  Isaak Hirsch, “Der Jude in der Literatur,” Jeschurun 5 (1858–59): 203–7, here 206–7. 68.  Zacharias Frankel, Review of “Kalendar und Jahrbuch auf das Jahr 5607,” Zeitschrift für die religiösen Interessen des Judenthums 3 (1846): 395–97, here 397. Isidor Busch’s Kalendar und Jahrbuch published the first version of Kompert’s “Alt Babele.” 69.  Constant von Wurzbach encapsulated this dynamic in an often quoted aphorism: “Unerklärlich, daß der Kompert / Dichtend nur von Juden spricht, / Unter Christen ist er Jud zwar, / Unter Juden ist er’s nicht” [Inexplicable that Kompert the poet speaks only of Jews. Among Christians he is a Jew, to be sure, but not among Jews]. Quoted in Winkelbauer, “Leopold Kompert und die böhmischen Landjuden,” 195. 70.  Geiger, review of “Kalendar und Jahrbuch auf das Jahr 5607,” Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts 6 (1846): 149–52, 153–56. 71.  See Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkrik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837–1922) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985). 72.  Review of “Kalendar und Jahrbuch auf das Jahr 5607,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 10 (1846): 514–15. 73.  Philippson, Review of Aus dem Ghetto, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 12 (1848): 512–13. 74.  [L. Phillipson,] “Literaturbericht V,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 19 (1855): 306–9 75.  See, for instance, the scant attention paid to Kompert in “Literarischer Wochenbericht,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 28 (1864): 822–23, and the disparaging review in the paper of Wilhelm Goldbaum’s book Entlegene Kulturen. Skizzen und Bilder (Berlin: A. Hofmann, 1877), Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 41 (1877): 397. 76.  [Ludwig Philippson,] “Literarischer Wochenbericht,” Allgemeine Zeitung

231

232

Notes des Judenthums 46 (1882): 750–51. 77.  Review of Geschichten einer Gasse, Der Israelit 5 (1864): 677–79. See also “Die moderne jüdische Tendenzpoesie,” Der Israelit 4 (1863): 479–83, as well as the comments on Kompert in a later article on Meir Goldschmidt, Der Israelit 16 (1875): 833–34. Der treue Zionswächter, the precursor to Hirsch’s Jeschurun, also carried enthusiastic and unusually large advertisements for Aus dem Ghetto in 1848. See Der treue Zionswächter 4 (1848): 152, reprinted in the next issues as well, 160. 78.  See, for instance, ——ky, “Leopold Kompert und die ‘Revue des deux Mondes,’” also Daniel Stauben’s preface to his French translation of Böhmische Juden, Les Juifs de la Bohème (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860), i–xvi, and Neustadt, “Leopold Kompert,” 372. 79.  Gerson Wolf, “Leopold Kompert,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 46 (1882): 365–66. 80.  Moritz Oppenheim, Erinnerungen, ed. Afred Oppenheim (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1924), 21. 81.  For Oppenheim, of course, Kompert was one stylistic model among others. As Liliane Weissberg and Georg Heuberger have argued, for instance, his work also manifests a strong influence of Goethe (see Weissberg and Heuberger, “The Rothschild of Painters and the Prince of Poets,” in Heuberger and Merk, eds., Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 131–52). Norman Kleeblatt and others argue in the Heuberg/Merk volume for multiple other artistic models as well. 82.  Kulke, “Leopold Kompert,” 439–40. 83.  Gerson Wolf, “Literarischer Wochenbericht,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 47 (1883): 825–26. 84.  Gerson Wolf, Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 50 (1886): 793. 85.  David Philipson, Old European Jewries (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894), 220–251, here 250, 226. 86.  Wilhelm Goldbaum, “Venezianische Ghetto-Geschichten,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 54 (1890): 471–73. See also Goldbaum, “Ghetto-Poeten,” in his Literarische Physiognomien (Vienna: Karl Prochaska, 1884), 163–216, especially the opening essay on Kompert, 163–74, where he presents him in more differentiated terms. 87.  Wilhlem Goldbaum, “Am Sterbetage Leopold Komperts,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 55 (1891): 57–71. 88.  See Krobb, “Reclaiming the Location,” and Fuchs, “Mimicry und Assimilation.” 89.  Schorsch, “Art as Social History,” 51 90.  David J. Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 91.  Franzos, “Leopold Kompert,” 156. 92.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).

Notes

Chapter 3 1.  Leopold Stein, “Die drei Säulen. (Unser Programm),” in Leopold Stein and Salomon Formstecher, eds., Der Freitagabend, eine Familienschrift 1, no. 1 (January 7, 1859): 1–7, here 3–4. 2.  Ibid., 3 3.  See Ludwig Philippson, “Das jüdische Volksblatt,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 18, no. 42 (October 16, 1854): 525–26, here 526, also “An unsere Leser,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 2, no. 52 (1854): 205–6. In its first year alone, the paper had 1,025 subscribers, which would lead one to assume a readership of at least 5,100 or so. Philippson, “An unsere Leser. Zum Schlusse des ersten Jahrgangs,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 1, no. 52 (1854): 205–6 4.  The letter is cited in anonymous, “Vor Einem hüte Deinen Sohn, Vater, Deine Tochter, Mutter! Das ist vor dem Romanenlesen!” Jüdisches Volksblatt 2, no. 26 (1855): 101–2, here 101. Sue’s Le Juif errant (The Wandering Jew), published in Le Constitutionel in 1844–1845, was simultaneously also the first major novel serialized in the German press. See the chapter on “The Development of Popular Literature in Germany” in Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers By Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 19–44, here 25, also Maria Adamowicz-Hariasz, “From Opinion to Information: The Roman-Feuilleton and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century French Press,” in Making the News: Modernity and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 160–84. 5.  Anonymous, “Vor Einem hüte Deinen Sohn, Vater, Deine Tochter, Mutter!” 101–2. 6.  Ibid., 101. 7.  The literature on the late eighteenth-century reading debates is vast. See, for instance, Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 22–50, also for general context, Karin Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780–1830 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). 8.  N. G., “Ein Wort, sowohl im Interesse des Judenthums, als der jüdischen Literatur-Gesellschaft,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 2, no. 40 (1855): 157–58, here 157. The author identifies himself as a resident of Látrány in Hungary. 9.  Alberto Martino, Die deutsche Leihbibliothek. Geschichte einer literarischen Institution (1756–1914) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990), 404. 10.  N. G., “Ein Wort,” 157. 11.  These works included, in chronological order: Wilhelm Frey, Erzählungen für die reifere Jugend und ihre Kreise (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1857); [Rahel Meyer,] Rahel. Eine biographische Novelle von der Verfasserin der “Zwei Schwestern” (Leipzig: Nies’sche Buchdruckerei, 1859); Grace Aguilar, Marie Henriquez Morales, trans. J.

233

234

Notes Piza (Magdeburg: Albert Falckenberg, 1860); Eugen Rispart [Isaac Ascher Francolm], Die Juden und die Kreuzfahrer in England unter Richard Löwenherz (Leipzig: Nies’sche Buchdruckerei, 1861); Benjamin Disraeli, Alroy (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1872), a reprint of the translation that Leiner had published in 1862; Rahel [Meyer], In Banden frei. Roman von Rahel, Verfasserin von “Zwei Schwestern,” “Rachel,” “Wider die Natur” u. A. (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1865); Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, Die Blockade von Pfalzburg im Jahre 1814 (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1868), a translation from the French; Eduard Kulke, Geschichten (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1869); Moses Wassermann, Judah Touro (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1871); and David Hongimann, Das Grab in Sabbioneta. Geschichtliche Novelle (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1872). 12.  Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 71–78, here 74–75. On the Institut see also Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkritik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837–1922) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), 153–64. 13.  See Hainer Plaul and Ulrich Schmid, “Die populären Lesestoffe,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5, Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (Munich: Hanser, 1998), 313–38, also Hainer Plaul, Illustrierte Geschichte der Trivialliteratur (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1983), 220–26. 14.  Of the four tales collected in Frey’s Erzählungen für die reifere Jugend und ihre Kreise, two were historical fictions, and two were tales of contemporary life. 15.  On Marlitt, see Todd Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation, 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 183–201; Kristen Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 130–41; also Kristen Belgum, “E. Marlitt: Narratives of Virtuous Desire,” in A Companion to German Realism, 1848–1900, ed. Todd Kontje (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 259–82. 16.  Anonymous, “Vorurtheile. Scenen aus dem Leben,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 9 (1862), 141–43, 145–47, here 145. 17.  Ibid., 145. 18.  Not surprisingly, while Stein and Formstecher’s Der Freitagabend obviously directed its “popular literature” at a Jewish audience, in the journal’s opening statement, Stein voiced the hope that non-Jews would find his new journal of interest as well. Stein, “Die drei Säulen,” 4. 19.  See Horch, Auf der Suche, as well as Itta Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986. 20.  Horch, Auf der Suche, 145; Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” 296 21.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die Gegensätze. Eine israelitisch-religiöse Novelle,”

Notes Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 2 (1838): 78–79, 81–83, 87–88, 126–27, 129–31, 225–27, 229–30, 326–28, 344–45, 348–49, 363–65, 395–97, 403–4, 412–13, subsequently reprinted as “Die Gegensätze. Eine Zeitnovelle,” in Ludwig and Phöbus Philippson, eds., Saron. Novellenbuch (Leipzig: Leopold Schnauß, 1865), vol. 2: 263–318. 22.  This chapter bases its arguments on a survey of more than sixty novellas, sketches, and novels dedicated to portraying contemporary Jewish life published between 1838 and 1875. The texts under consideration here were published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, the Jüdisches Volksblatt, Stein and Formstecher’s Der Freytagabend, and other journals, as well as in book form by the Institut and independent publishing houses. Tales focusing on love and marriage predominate within this body of literature but there are a number of other narrative genres— detective stories, personal memoirs, village tales, etc.—that find ample representation here too. 23.  [Rahel Meyer,] Zwei Schwestern. Ein Roman (Berlin: Veit, 1853), 3 vols.; Salomon Formstecher, Buchenstein und Cohnberg. Ein Familiengemälde aus der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Bechhold, 1863). I owe a special debt to Ed Potter for helping me get hold of an electronic copy of Meyer’s novel from the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen. 24.  See, on this genre, the section on the “Jewish family novel” in Ritchie Robertson, The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749–1939: Emancipation and Its Discontents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 273–85, also the chapter, “Zum deutsch-jüdischen Zeitroman von Rahel Meyer bis Auguste Haschner” in Florian Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen. Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999), 126–37. 25.  See, for instance, Walter Hinderer, Codierungen von Liebe in der Kunstperiode (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1997), here 16, also Edgar Landgraf’s productive analysis in “Romantic Love and the Enlightenment: From Gallantry and Seduction to Authenticity and Self-Validation,” German Quarterly 77 (2004): 29–46. Both Landgraf and the essays in the Hinderer volume engage in significant ways with Niklas Luhmann’s seminal study, Die Liebe als Passion. Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1982). On the importance of Richardson in this context, see Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation, 18–40, also Tania Modlewski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008). 26.  Modlewski’s Loving with a Vengeance, originally published in 1982, was pathbreaking in its effort to take romance fiction seriously as an object of scholarly study and consider the cultural work that romance fiction performs for its readers. Janice A. Radway’s equally pioneering book, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), deserves mention here even though it does not concern itself with the historical development of romance fiction. In her recent work on evangelical romance

235

236

Notes novels in the United States, Lynn S. Neal makes claims for evangelical romance that run parallel to my argument that German-Jewish romance fiction made falling in love with a future mate inextricable from falling in love with Judaism itself. See Neal, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 27.  Fanny Lewald, Jenny (Berlin: Der Morgen, 1967). For background on Lewald, see Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation, 152–70. On the Jewish reception of Lewald, see Horch, Auf der Suche, 115–19, also Meyer Kayserling, Die jüdischen Frauen in der Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1879), 247–48. 28.  See the chapter on “Jewish marriage strategies” in Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 85–116. 29.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die Gegensätze.” Ludwig gave “Die Gegensätze” the designation “Zeitnovelle” when he republished it in Saron. 30.  Ibid., 78. 31.  Ibid., 227. 32.  Ibid., 413. 33.  Ibid., 127. 34.  Ibid., 130. 35.  Ibid., 229. 36.  Ibid., 328. 37.  See Florian Krobb, Die schöne Jüdin. Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). For a rich and multifaceted exploration of this topic in the British context, see Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 38.  [Ludwig Philippson,] “Förderung und Hemmniß. Eine Skizze aus dem Leben,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 5 (1841): 151–54, 169–70, 186–87, 202–4, 285–87, 293–99, 328–31, later reprinted in Saron. Novellenbuch, vol. 2: 215–61. 39.  Ludwig Philippson, “Speicher, Bude und Salon. Aus dem Leben,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 11 (1864): 150–52, 153–55, 169–71, 173–75, 177–80, 185–87, 189–91, 193–95, reprinted in Saron. Novellenenbuch (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1870), vol. 4: 285–352, here 339 40.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die Begegnung,” Saron. Novellenbuch (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1863), vol. 3: 341–50, here 344. 41.  Ibid., 345. 42.  Ibid., 350. 43.  Ludwig Schragge [Ludwig Philippson], “Eine Familiengeschichte,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 2 (1854–55): 81–84, 85–88, here 83. 44.  Ibid., 83. 45.  Ibid., 86, 83. 46.  D.S. “Die beiden Waisen, Novellete,” Der Freitagabend, eine Familienschrift

Notes 1 (1859): 771–76, 789–94, 803–9, 819–30; Anonymous, “Verbrechen und Liebe,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 10 (1863): 1–2, 9–11, 13–14, 17–19, 21–23, 29–31, 33–34, 37–38, 41–43. 47.  Formstecher, Buchenstein und Cohnberg, 209, 27, 156. 48.  For context , see Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), and Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). 49.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die Union. Eine Novelle,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 11 (1864): 33–34, 37–39, 41–43, 45–47, 49–51, 53–56, 57–60, 61–63, here 34. 50.  Ibid., 34. 51.  Ibid. 52.  Ibid. 53.  Ibid., 51. 54.  See in particular Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany. 55.  Ludwig Philippson, “Die Gouvernante,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 10 (1863), reprinted in (and quoted according to) Saron. Novellenenbuch (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1870), vol. 4: 225–83. 56.  See, for instance, “Die jüdischen Gouvernanten,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 20, no. 27 (July 3, 1866): 419–21 57.  “Philippson, “Die Gouvernante,” 227, 236. 58.  See on this issue, and for cultural background more broadly, Ruth Brandon, Governess: The Life and Times of the Real Jane Eyres (New York: Walker, 2008). 59.  See, for instance, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Roman, trans. Christoph Friedrich Grieb (Stuttgart: Franck, 1850), or Jane Eyre, oder, Die Waise aus Lowood, trans. A. Heinrich (Pest: Hartleben’s Verlags-Expedition, 1854). 60.  “Philippson, “Die Gouvernante,” 242, 258. 61.  Ibid., 283. The mutual friend who came to aid Franziska turns out to be the man who jilted her years before. He ends up marrying Auguste, for better or for worse: “Whether Herr Adler’s marriage was a happy one . . . is a matter about which I have nothing to tell my friendly reader, for I am not among the friends of that household” (283). 62.  [Meyer,] Zwei Schwestern, vol. 1: 226. 63.  See Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 70–72, as well as Bettina Kratz-Ritter’s monograph, Salomon Formstecher. Ein deutscher Reformrabbiner (Hildesheim: Olms, 1991), also Thomas Meyer, “Salomon Formstechers ‘Religion des Geistes’—Versuch einer Neulektüre,” Aschkenas 13 (2002): 441–60. 64.  Salomon Formstecher, “Der geraubte Sohn. Ein Sittenbild der Gegenwart Von Dr. S. Formstecher, Rabbiner zu Offenbach a. M.,” Jüdisches Volksblatt 6 (1859): 145–48, 149–50, 153–56, 157–58, 161–64. 65.  Formstecher, Buchenstein und Cohnberg, v.

237

238

Notes 66.  Ibid., v–vi. 67.  Gustav Freytag, Soll und Haben. Roman in sechs Büchern (Munich: Hanser, 1977). It bears mentioning that Formstecher published some early studies for Buchenstein und Cohnberg in K. Klein’s Volkskalender für Israeliten in 1851, four years before Soll und Haben was originally published (see Kratz-Ritter, Salomon Formstecher, 108). Clearly, the original conception of the novel may not have been to engage in dialogue with Freytag. My concern, however, is with the structure of the version of the text that Formstecher published in 1863, and in this regard, I differ considerably from Kratz-Ritter, who mines the text for its historical detail and quickly writes it off as lacking in literary value (Kratz-Ritter, Salomon Formstecher, 25–26). 68.  Formstecher, Buchenstein und Cohnberg, 36–37, 8–9 69.  At one point, Joseph spends close to twenty pages summarizing many of the views Formstecher formulated years earlier in Die Religion des Geistes. See ibid., 236–54. 70.  Horch, Auf der Suche, 52–53. On Soll und Haben, see Florian Krobb, ed., 150 Jahre Soll und Haben. Studien zu Gustav Freytags kontroversem Roman (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005). Freytag’s own attitudes toward Jews— and subsequent generations of German Jews’ attitudes toward Soll und Haben—are considerably more complicated than I have occasion to explore here. 71.  See [Marcus Lehmann,] “Die moderne jüdische Tendenzpoesie,” Der Israelit 4, no. 39 (October 7, 1863): 479–83. 72.  Anonymous, review of Buchenstein und Cohnberg, Monatsschrift zur Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums Heft 8 (1863): 316–18, here 317–318. My emphasis. 73.  B. Wald, review of Buchenstein und Cohnberg, Ben Chananja. Wochenblatt für jüdische Theologie 6, no. 7 (February 11, 1863), 116. Ben Chananja was edited by the Hungarian reformer Leopold Löw. 74.  Gustav Karpeles mentions Formstecher’s Buchenstein und Cohnberg in the concluding chapter of his 1886 Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1963), vol. 2: 428—clear evidence that this novel remained on the radar for some time. And as Horch notes, lists published in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums recommending titles for school and association libraries frequently included Buchenstein und Cohnberg as well (Auf der Suche, 161–63). 75.  Fanni Neuda, Jugend-Erzählungen aus dem jüdischen Familienleben (Vienna, 1876). On Neuda, see Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History, 34, also Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 114. 76.  The best source for information about Rahel Meyer’s life is Kayserling, Die jüdischen Frauen in der Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst, 248–253. See, however, also Nahida Remy, Das jüdische Weib (Leipzig: G. Laudien, 1892), 163–64, 285–86, which borrows much of its information (and a significant amount of its language) from Kayserling.

Notes 77.  Regina Neisser, “Rahel Meyer. Ein Gedenkblatt,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 63, no. 19 (May 12, 1899): 223–24, here 224. 78.  Friedrich Hebbel, Briefwechsel 1829–1863, ed. Otfrid Ehrismann, Henry Gerlach, Günter Häntzschel, Hermann Knebel, and Hargen Thomsen (Munich: Iudicium, 1999), 5 vols., here vol. 2: 544, also 569, 614–18. 79.  Quoted in Kayserling, Die jüdischen Frauen in der Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst, 250. 80.  [Meyer,] Zwei Schwestern, vol. 1: 22, 25, 28–29 81.  See Maya Gerig, Jenseits von Tugend und Empfindsamkeit. Gesellschaftspolitik im Frauenroman um 1800 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008), also more generally, Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation. 82.  [Meyer,] Zwei Schwestern, vol. 1: 65. 83.  Ibid., 99. 84.  Ibid., 117–78, also 149. 85.  Ibid., vol. 2: 120. 86.  Ibid., vol. 1: 135. 87.  Ibid., 151. 88.  Ibid., 206–7, 170, 234. 89.  Ibid., vol. 3: 231. 90.  See Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (New York: Knopf, 1993). 91.  Quoted according to ibid., 25. 92.  [Meyer,] Rahel, 190 93.  See, for instance, ibid., 163, 188. 94.  Ibid., 193. 95.  Ibid., 201–24, here 224. 96.  Anonymous, “Rachel,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 21 (1867): 143–44, 164, here 143 97.  [Meyer,] Rahel, 97, 118–19. 98.  Ibid., 131–33. 99.  Ibid., 162 100.  Quoted according to “Literarischer Wochenbericht,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 29, no. 21 (May 23, 1865): 318. The review apparently appeared in issue 113 of the Kölnische Zeitung. 101.  H. G., “In Banden frei,” Illustrierte Monatshefte für die gesammten Interessen des Judenthums 1, no. 1 (October 1865): 62–65, here 64–65. 102.  See, for instance, Rahel [Meyer,] In Banden frei, 741. 103.  On Meyer and Davidson, see Kayserling, Die jüdischen Frauen in der Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst, 252. 104.  On Varnhagen’s biography, see the exemplary analysis in Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 105.  [Meyer,] Zwei Schwestern, vol. 3: 39–40.

239

240

Notes 106.  See for general background, and for a brief discussion of Meyer’s In Banden frei, Florian Krobb, “’Und setzten einen Triumph darein, abtrünnig zu werden’: Spiegelungen der Salonepoche in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Menora. Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte 6 (1995): 113–35, esp. 127–32. 107.  Rahel [Meyer], In Banden frei, 434. Pauline’s language clearly echoes Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) here. 108.  [Meyer], In Banden frei, 498. 109.  Ibid., 550. 110.  Ibid., 550 111.  Ibid., 551 112.  The Institut started publishing Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden starting with the third volume of Graetz’s study, in 1856. See my brief discussion in Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 170, also Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Oskar Leiner, 1900), vol. 11: 168–69. 113.  [Meyer], In Banden frei, 559 114.  Ibid., 572 115.  See on this issue, for instance, Jeffrey Sammons’s article “The NineteenthCentury German Novel,” in German Literature of the Nineteenth Century, 1832– 1899, ed. Eric Downing and Clayton Koelb (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005). 116.  [Meyer], In Banden frei, 86 117.  Ibid., 109–10, 137–38. 118.  Regina Neisser, “Rahel Meyer. Ein Gedenkblatt,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 63, no. 19 (May 12, 1899): 223–24, here 224. 119.  See the chapter “Zum deutsch-jüdischen Zeitroman von Rahel Meyer bis Auguste Haschner” in Florian Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen, 126–37. 120.  Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 114–16.

Chapter 4 1.  Ludwig Geiger, “Zwei jüdische Erzählungen,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums 62, no. 31 (August 5, 1898): 366–68, here 366. On Geiger’s literary criticism and the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, see Hans Otto Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. Die Literaturkrik der “Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judentums” (1837–1922) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), also Andreas B. Kilcher, “Was ist ‘deutsch-jüdische Literatur’? Eine historische Diskursanalyse,” Weimarer Beiträge 45 (1999): 485–517. As mentioned, the most comprehensive discussion of literature and literary criticism in German-Jewish periodicals remains Itta Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986.

Notes 2.  Geiger, “Zwei jüdische Erzählungen,” 366. Geiger’s obvious target is the work of Karl Emil Franzos, whom we discussed briefly in Chapter 2. 3.  Ibid., 366, 368. 4.  Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur, 208–26. 5.  Judith Bleich, “The Emergence of an Orthodox Press in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 42 (1980): 323–44. 6.  As Bleich notes, belles lettres played a minimal role in the conception of Der treue Zionswächter, even though it did publish literature in its parallel Hebrew edition, Shomer Tsion ha-Ne’eman. 7.  Itta Shedletzky identifies “S” in “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” 124. Shedletzky draws on information from Mordechai Breuer, who offers the only other significant sustained discussion of orthodox belles lettres in Germany and a brief mention of Sara Hirsch Guggenheim as well. See Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition: The Social History of Orthodox Jewry in Imperial Germany, trans. Elizabeth Petuchowski (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 155–62. 8.  Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 13. 9.  Jeschurun stopped publication after volume 15 (1868–1869), starting up again with volume 16 in 1883, under the editorship of Hirsch’s son Isaak. After 1887, it ceased independent publication and merged with Der Israelit. 10.  See the biography of Lehmann published by his son, Jon Lehmann, Dr. Markus Lehmann (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, 1910), here 26–35, later reprinted in Jon Lehmann, ed., Gesammlte Erzählungen für das jüdische Haus (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, n.d.) 11.  Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 171–72. 12.  One feature that this fiction shares with Geiger is its laxity about generic designations. Geiger, in reviewing Jensen and Wassermann, groups together novellas and novels under the general rubric of the novel, and the fiction in Der Israelit and Jeschurun shares a similar indifference to generic markers. 13.  Gaby Wenig, “All-Female Plays Fill Niche for Frum,” Jewish Journal of Los Angeles (February 27, 2004), at www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview. php?id=11865. 14.  Marcus Lehmann, Säen und Ernten, in Der Israelit 11, nos. 22–52 (June 1– December 28, 1870), also published as a “Gratis-Beilage zum Israelit” in the 1880s and translated into English as A Portrait of Two Families (New York / Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1981). 15.  See Beatrice Lang Caplan, “Orthodox Yiddish Literature in Interwar Poland,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2005. 16.  Morascha Verlag, based in Basel, Switzerland, markets Lehmann’s books on its website as ideal reading for adults and children alike (www.morascha.ch), as does Feldheim.com, a major distributor of traditional Jewish books. 17.  Gustav Karpeles, “Ein Briefwechsel über die jüdische Romanliteratur,” Der

241

242

Notes Israelit 11, no. 10 (March 9, 1870): 177–79. Karpeles here adapts the program of poetic realism as articulated by Julian Schmidt in the Grenzboten to contemporary orthodox fiction. In Karpeles’s later, oft-cited and reissued Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (1886), Lehmann still occupies a place of prominence, cited here alongside Philippson. See Karpeles, Geschichte der jüdischen Literatur (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1963), vol. 2: 428. 18.  There are a few notable exceptions. See, in addition to Shedletzky and Caplan, cited above, Annegret Völpel and Zohar Shavit, Deutsch-jüdische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur. Ein literaturgeschichtlicher Grundriß, with Ran HaCohen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), 147–97; and, dealing with a later period, Michael Brenner, “East and West in Orthodox German-Jewish Novels (1912–1934),” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 37 (1992): 309–23. Florian Krobb, Jonathan Skolnik, and Nitsa Ben-Ari have done pioneering work on Lehmann’s historical fiction, but without reference to his novels of contemporary Jewish life. See Florian Krobb, Kollektivautobiographien, Wunschautobiographien. Marranenschicksal im deutsch-jüdischen historischen Roman (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 73–86; Jonathan Skolnik, “Writing Jewish History at 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, ed. Nicholas Vaszonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 227–38; Jonathan Skolnik, “’Who Learns History from Heine?’ The German-Jewish Novel as Cultural Memory and Minority Culture, 1824–1953,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999; and Nitsa Ben-Ari, Romanze mit der Vergangenheit. Der deutsch-jüdische historiche Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts und seine Bedeutung für die Entstehung einer jüdischen Nationalliteratur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006). One of the most important sources for work on Lehmann remains his son Jon’s biography, cited above. See also the typescript by Mochè Catane, La vie et l’oeuvre du Rabbin M. Lehmann (1831–1890) (Jerusalem, 1971). Catane’s mother, Marguerite Klein, translated Lehmann’s work into French, and Catane’s own work draws heavily on Jon Lehmann’s biography and interviews with surviving Lehmann descendants. 19.  See, in particular, Robert Liberles, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main, 1838–1877 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985); Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition; David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of a Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990); Ellenson, After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004); and Adam S. Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 20.  See, for instance, in addition to Ellenson, After Emancipation, Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005); Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); and Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins

Notes Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004). 21.  Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, 12. 22.  See, for instance, S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], Risse, Jeschurun 12, nos. 5–12 (February– August 1866), continued in vol. 13, nos. 1–9 (September 1866–June 1867), or Friedrich Rott, Proselyten, in Der Israelit 17 (1876) continued in vol. 18 (1877). 23.  Anonymous, “Vereinsamt,” in Der Israelit 16, here no. 13 (March 31, 1875): 283, and 16, no. 15 (April 14, 1875): 334. 24.  “Des Königs Eidam” appeared twice in 1867, first in Der Israelit, where it was the paper’s first long piece of historical fiction, and also in the first volume of Lehmann’s often reprinted anthology Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, 1867). It was reprinted yet again as the inaugural volume of Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei, a 62–volume orthodox book series published by Kauffmann in Frankfurt am Main from 1897 to 1912. In English, it has appeared as “The Adopted Princess” in 1948, 1954, 1978, and 1992, and as “Faith and Courage” in 1965 and 1981. 25.  Lehmann, “Des Königs Eidam,” Der Israelit, here 8, no. 29 (July 17, 1867): 498. 26.  Ibid., 755. 27.  Ibid., 40 (October 2, 1867): 689. 28.  See also, for instance, Marcus Lehmann’s tale, “Das Licht der Diaspora” (The Light of the Diaspora), published originally in Der Israelit 10, nos. 17–32 (April 28–August 11, 1869), reprinted in volume 1 of Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart and later as volume 4 of Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei. This tale has been translated into English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian. Here too Lehmann concentrates on the private lives of great public figures, tapping into legends about Rabbeinu Gershom Me’Or Hagolah (960–1028) that give a real-life and domestic reason for the Mainz rabbi’s famous ban on polygamy among Ashkenazic Jews. 29.  Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870, pays considerable attention to German-Jewish orthodoxy, although the book does not deal explicitly with fiction. Baader is not the only recent scholar to approach nineteenth-century German-Jewish culture from this angle. See also, for instance, Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum, 326–60. In her analysis of domestic Judaism, Baader builds on both Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), and Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 30.  Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 150. 31.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edition (London: Verso, 1991). 32.  See Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen

243

244

Notes Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” but especially Horch, Auf der Suche nach der jüdischen Erzählliteratur. 33.  Shedletzky, “Literaturdiskussion und Belletristik in den jüdischen Zeitschriften in Deutschland, 1837–1914,” 121ff. 34.  [Marcus Lehmann,] “Die moderne jüdische Tendenzpoesie,” Der Israelit 4, no. 39 (October 7, 1863): 479–83; Salomon Kohn, “Ueber die nöthige Vorsicht bei der Wahl der Jugendschriften, Ein Wink für Eltern, Lehrer und Erzieher,” Der Israelit 6, no. 25 (June 21, 1865): 353–54. 35.  Jon Lehmann, Dr. Markus Lehmann, 78–79. 36.  See, for instance, the prefatory note written by Selina Sassoon, Lehmann’s granddaughter, to The Royal Resident: A Historical Tale (London: Honigson, 1964), or Osher Lehmann’s preface to Rabbi Yoselman of Rosheim (New York: Feldheim, 2002). In the early twentieth century, Jon Lehmann became a prolific orthodox writer in his own right. 37.  See the unusually large advertisement for Aus dem Ghetto in the advertising section of Der treue Zionswächter 4, no. 19 (May 9, 1848): 152, reprinted in no. 20 (May 16, 1848): 160. See J. Gettig, “Ein Märtyrer neuerer Zeit,” Der treue Zionswächter 1, nos. 16–19 (October 14–November 4, 1845): 130–31, 135–36, 142–45, 151–52, and B. Bertholdy, “Auch eine Dorfgeschichte,” Der treue Zionswächter 2, no. 4 (January 27, 1846): 30–31. 38.  See Hirsch’s editorial note to “Sabbathausgang,” in Jeschurun 4, no. 1 (October 1857): 48. 39.  N. G., “Ein Wort über jüdische Belletristik,” Jeschurun 4, no. 11 (August 1858): 574–78. I have been unable to determine the identity of N. G. 40.  [Marcus Lehmann,] “Die moderne jüdische Tendenzpoesie,” 479. 41.  N. G., “Ein Wort,” 577–78. 42.  Ibid., 574–75. 43.  Ibid. 44.  Isaak Hirsch, “Der Jude in der Literatur,” Jeschurun 5, no. 4 (January 1859): 203–7, here 206–7. 45.  Ibid., 203–4. 46.  Ibid., 204. 47.  N. G., “Jüdische Belletristik,” Jeschurun 5, no. 10 (July 1859): 543–45, here 543. 48.  Ibid., 543–44. 49.  [Marcus Lehmann,] “Die moderne jüdische Tendenzpoesie,” 479. Lehmann refers here to the work of the Philippson brothers, Salomon Formstecher, and Leopold Stein. Der Israelit was consistent in its praise for Kompert. See also the anonymous review of Geschichten einer Gasse, Der Israelit 5, no. 51 (December 21, 1864): 677–79, discussed in Chapter 2. 50.  N. G., “Mariamne, die letzte Hasmonäerin, von Dr. Ludw. Philippson,” Jeschurun 6, no. 3 (December 1859): 155–62, here 161.

Notes 51.  N. G., “Der unbekannte Rabbi, von D. Ph. Philippson,” Jeschurun 6, no. 3 (December 1859): 162–67, continued in vol. 6, no. 6 (March 1860): 327–31, here 328. On the Institut, see Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 71–78. 52.  N. G., “Der unbekannte Rabbi,” 163–64. 53.  Ibid., 331. 54.  Jon Lehmann, Dr. Markus Lehmann, 79. 55.  Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 56. See also Völpel and Shavit, Deutschjüdische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur, 164ff. 56.  Samson Raphael Hirsch, editorial note to “Sabbathausgang.” 57.  J., “Ein Opfer,” in Jeschurun 9, no. 5 (February 1859): 258–67; J., “Ein Viertelchen,” Jeschurun 9, no. 9 (June 1859): 480–91; J., “Die Einführung einer Synagogenordnung, eine Geschichte von Vielen,” Jeschurun 9, no. 12 (September 1859): 648–58; and J., “Eine Aufgeklärte,” Jeschurun 9, no. 3 (December 1860): 171–78. 58.  S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], “Aus der Judengasse,” Jeschurun 9, no. 4 (January 1863): 180–87, S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], “Aus der Gegenwart,” Jeschurun 9, no. 6 (March 1863): 260–79, continued in no. 7 (April 1863): 314–28. 59.  S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], Licht- und Schattenbilder, Jeschurun 11, nos. 6–12 (March–September 1865). The notice, “Vor Nachdruck wird gewarnt,” appears for the first time in the second instalment, in no. 7 (April 1865): 219. 60.  S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], “Aus der Gegenwart II,” Jeschurun 10, no. 1 (September 1863): 14–22; no. 3 (November 1863): 80–88; no. 4 (December 1863): 120–27; no. 6 (February 1864): 204–14, here no. 3 (November 1863), 8. 61.  Ibid., 10, no. 6 (February 1864): 213. 62.  Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 87–93. 63.  S[arah Hirsch Guggenheim], “Aus der Gegenwart,” 327–29 64.  See Jon Lehmann, Dr. Markus Lehmann, 26–35. The turning point in Lehmann’s early career as a writer was a draft of a drama about British history, König Monmouth, that Lehmann’s friend, the writer Emil Palleske, had arranged to have read publicly in Berlin. On the night of the reading, Lehmann burned the manuscript, pledging instead to dedicate himself to the rabbinate. 65.  Marcus Lehmann, “Die Verlassene,” Der Israelit 8, nos. 45–52 (November 6–December 25, 1867). “Die Verlassene” also appeared in 1867 in Lehmann’s anthology, Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, and was reprinted in volume 3 of Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei. 66.  See, for instance, Marcus Lehmann, Vater und Sohn, Der Israelit 9, nos. 33–47 (August 12–November 18, 1868): 623–24, 639–40, 655–66, 679–80, 699– 700, 719–20, 739–40, 755–56, 783–84, 799–800, 819–20, 835–36, 855–56, 871–72; or Marcus Lehmann, “Unmöglich,” Der Israelit 10, nos. 1–16 (January 6–April 21, 1869): 7–8, 23–24, 42–44, 63–64, 79–80, 99–100, 115–16, 135–36, 159–60, 183– 84, 198–200, 223–24, 255–56, 279–80, 303–4. “Unmöglich” was republished as a Gratis-Beilage to the Israelit in the 1880s, incorporated as volume 48 of Lehmann’s

245

246

Notes jüdische Volkbücherei, and translated into English as Out of the Depths (1946, 1957, 1942, 1992). An analogous celebration of the superiority of Jewish law over secular courts is found in S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], “Aus der Zukunft,” Jeschurun 10, no. 11 (August 1864): 369–84. 67.  Marcus Lehmann, “Die Verlassene,” Der Israelit 9, no. 49 (December 4, 1867): 842. 68.  Ibid., 52 (December 25, 1867): 902. 69.  Lennard J. Davis, for instance, speaks of a “news-novels discourse,” a close kinship between fiction and journalism, central to the rise of the novel; see his Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 70.  See, for instance, Marcus Lehmann, “Gabriel,” Der Israelit 12, nos. 1–10 (January 4–March 8, 1871); Zur rechten Zeit, Der Israelit 12, nos. 11–42 (March 15–October 18, 1871), reprinted as a Gratis-Beilage in 1893, and as vols. 52–53 in Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei, and published frequently in English as Just in Time (1954, 1965, 1981); Lehmann, “Das Testament,” Der Israelit 13, no. 45–52 (November 6–December 25, 1872), continued in vol. 14, nos. 1–7 (1873); Lehmann, “Zwei Kriegsgefangene,” Der Israelit 15, nos. 10–15 (1874): 193–94, 217–18, 241–42, 261–62, 265–67, 292–94. 71.  Marcus Lehmann, “Elvire. Mitgetheilt von einem Rabbiner,” Der Israelit 9, nos. 13–23 (March 25–June 3, 1868): 223–24, 239–40, 271–72, 295–96, 319–20, 343– 44, 367–68, 391–92, 415–16, 435–36. “Elvire” later appeared as a Gratis-Beilage to Der Israelit in the 1890s and was published once again in the early twentieth century in Jon Lehmann, ed., Gesammlte Erzählungen für das jüdische Haus (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, n.d.) 72.  Lehmann, “Elvire,” Der Israelit 9, no. 13 (March 25, 1868): 223. 73.  Ibid., 224. 74.  Ibid., no. 23 (June 3, 1868): 344. 75.  Ibid., no. 13 (March 25, 1868): 223. 76.  Marcus Lehmann, “Das Testament,” Der Israelit 13, no. 45 (November 6, 1872): 940. 77.  S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], Risse, Jeschurun 12, nos. 5–12 (February–August 1866), continued in vol. 13, nos. 1–9 (September 1866–June 1867), here 12, no. 5 (February 1866): 199. 78.  [Marcus Lehmann,] “Gabriel,” Der Israelit 12, nos. 2 (January 11, 1871): 24. “Gabriel” was published anonymously, like so much of the fiction in Der Israelit— and like much nineteenth-century serialized fiction in general. Its narrator, however, is a Jewish resident of Mainz who is always on the look-out for wounded Jewish soldiers in the local army hospital, just to make sure they receive kosher food (if they want it) and a proper Jewish burial if they should die. 79.  Lehmann, “Unmöglich,” Der Israelit 10, no. 4 (January 27, 1869): 64. 80.  Ibid., no. 1 (January 6, 1869): 8.

Notes 81.  S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], Licht- und Schattenbilder, Jeschurun 11, no. 6 (March 1865): 192, and no. 2 (April 1865): 228. 82.  Marcus Lehmann, Gegenströmungen, Der Israelit 21, nos. 2–29 (1880), here no. 18: 434. I discuss Gegenströmungen in greater detail below. 83.  A. Königshofen, Auf Irrwegen, Der Israelit 15, nos. 16–50 (1874), here 389, 552. Little is known about Königshofen, who also published “Die Jugendfreunde” in Der Israelit 22, nos. 2–25 (January 12–June 22, 1881). 84.  Marcus Lehmann, Vater und Sohn, Der Israelit 9, nos. 33–47 (August 12– November 18, 1868), here no. 37 (September 9, 1868), 699–700. 85.  Anonymous, “Haw, Haw!” Der Israelit 14, nos. 48–53 (1873), continued in vol. 15, nos. 1–9 (1874), here vol. 14, no. 49 (1873): 959. The title, a German transliteration from the Hebrew “Hav, Hav!” is a reference to Proverbs 30:15 and a Mishnaic commentary referred to in the text. Translated in the text as “Gib her, gib her!” [give, give], “Haw, haw!” functions as a shorthand for Bernhard Fünfkirchner’s tragic materialism and lack of spirituality. 86.  Anonymous, “Haw, Haw!” 15, no. 4 (1874): 66. 87.  Ibid., 14, no. 51 (1873): 1004. 88.  Marcus Lehmann, Säen und Ernten, Der Israelit 11, no. 27 (July 6, 1870): 507–8. 89.  Ibid., no. 35 (August 31, 1870): 655–56. 90.  Ibid., no. 44 (November 2, 1870): 812. 91.  Anonymous, review of Geschichten einer Gasse, 678. 92.  From 1885 on, Kohn regularly published historical fiction in Der Israelit, inevitably listed as “the author of Gabriel.” On Kohn’s popularity among the orthodox, see Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 155–56; on Kohn in general see Florian Krobb, Selbstdarstellungen. Untersuchungen zur deutsch-jüdischen Erzählliteratur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1999), 58–69. Skolnik discusses the reception of Jewish historical fiction in “Who Learns History from Heine?” 107–16. 93.  There were some exceptions, but these tended only to reinforce the insularity of orthodox belles lettres. In an extremely rare 1872 review in the mainstream Deutsche Roman-Zeitung, Lehmann’s Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was taken to task for its extreme chauvinism and lack of aesthetic standards, all of which the reviewer juxtaposed to the much more tolerant model of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise. See Deutsche Roman-Zeitung 15 (1872): 227, quoted in Skolnik, “Who Learns History from Heine?” 112. 94.  See the seminal work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Chana Kronfeld has productively adapted this model to the field of Jewish literature in On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Jonathan Skolnik makes claims about the German-Jewish historical novel that are analogous to mine, noting that

247

248

Notes Jewish historical fiction sought to create a “minority niche within the contemporary field of cultural production” that would give Jews a “means of acquiring the ‘cultural capital’ that was a prerequisite for integration in the age of Bildung” (“Who Learns History from Heine?” 92). 95.  S[ara Hirsch Guggenheim], Angela, Jeschurun 14, nos. 6–12 (March–July 1868), continued in vol. 15, nos. 1–4 (October 1868–July 1869). 96.  See “Charles Dickens und die Juden,” Der Israelit 11, no. 32 (August 10, 1870): 609–11. 97.  Lehmann, “Unmöglich,” no. 16 (April 21, 1869): 304. 98.  Guggenheim, “Aus der Gegenwart II,” no. 1 (September 1863): 15; no. 4 (December 1863): 127. 99.  Ibid., no. 4 (December 1863): 125. 100.  The literature on Lessing and bourgeois tragedy is too broad to survey in this context. See Gail K. Hart, Tragedy in Paradise: Family and Gender Politics in Bourgeois Tragedy, 1750–1850 (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996); Bengt Algot Sørensen, Herrschaft und Zärtlichkeit. Der Patriarchalismus und das Drama im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 1984); or Karl Guthke, Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980). 101.  Guggenheim, “Aus der Gegenwart II,” no. 6 (February 1864): 213. 102.  Marcus Lehmann, Between Two Worlds, trans. Chani Feferkorn (New York: Feldheim, 1982). 103.  Marcus Lehmann, “Daniel Deronda,” Der Israelit 17, no. 46 (November 15, 1876): 1045–49. 104.  See, for instance, David Kaufmann, “George Eliot und die Juden,” Monatsschrift für die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 26, nos. 4–6 (1877): 172–88, 214–31, 255–70. 105.  Lehmann, “Daniel Deronda,” 1048. 106.  Lehmann, Gegenströmungen, 731. 107.  Ibid., 326–27. The English here follows Marcus Lehmann, Between Two Worlds, 76–77, with some very minor adjustments. 108.  George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Middlesex: Penguin, 1996), 202–3. 109.  Ibid., 208; Lehmann, Gegenströmungen, 327–38; idem, Between Two Worlds, 78–79. 110.  George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, trans. Adolf Strodtmann (Berlin: Gebr. Paetel, 1876). Lehmann’s German in Gegenströmungen, incidentally, bears little resemblance to the Strodtmann translation, which should not be surprising, given that he reviewed Eliot’s novel in the original almost immediately after it was published. 111.  Book jacket for Between Two Worlds. 112.  See, on this issue, Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy. Debates over separatist orthodoxy also had counterparts in orthodox fiction. See, for instance, Marcus Lehmann, Vater und Sohn; idem, Säen und Ernten; and “Vereinsamt.”

Notes 113.  Breuer, Modernity Within Tradition, 150. 114.  Ibid., 70–71. 115.  Ellenson, After Emancipation, 256. 116.  See Jonathan M. Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 117.  The examples are too numerous to enumerate. See, for instance, Guggenheim’s Angela; Lehmann’s Säen und Ernten and his Gegenströmungen; Königshofen’s Die Jugendfreunde; but also Lehmann’s Graf oder Jude, Der Israelit 10, nos. 39–52 (September 29–December 29, 1869). Graf oder Jude was included in vol. 1 of Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart and was later published as volume 2 of Lehmann’s jüdische Volksbücherei. It appeared in English in 1965 and again in 1981, as Del Monte. The very first piece of original fiction published in Der Israelit, tellingly, was a rewriting of Lessing’s 1749 comedy Die Juden that foregrounds a friendship between members of the nobility and a self-consciously orthodox Jew, one who, unlike Lessing’s protagonists, grounds his universal humanity in Talmudic wisdom. See “Vorurtheile,” Der Israelit 8, nos. 1–3 (January 2–January 16, 1867): 7–8, 23–24, 42–44.

Concluding Remarks 1.  See the entry for Oscar Gustav Hirschfeld, Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1905), vol. 50: 367–82. 2.  Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 285–86 3.  Naomi Ragen, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 114. 4.  Ibid., 341. 5.  /www.harrywalker.com/speakers_template.cfm?Spea_ID=1090, accessed on October 24, 2008. 6.  www.naomiragen.com, accessed on October 24, 2008. I also rely here on Naomi Ragen, “We Write the Books We Want to Read: The Compelling Jewish Narrative,” lecture delivered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, September 23, 2005.

249

Index

Abarbanel, Issac: as historical figure, 29–30, 217n17; literary depiction of in Philippson’s Die Marannen and other works, 28, 29–30, 45, 63–64 Abramovitsh, S. Y., 9, 74 Adolescents, as readers, 10, 21, 139, 161, 188 Age of Goethe, 11, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 25, 203 Aguilar, Grace, 9, 28, 220n58; The Vale of Cedars¸ 27–29, 36, 41–47, 57, 221n63, German adaptation of, Marie Henriquez Morales, 36, 42–47, 219n40; as rewritten by Ludwig Philippson, 48–54 Aleichem, Sholem, 1, 74, 75 Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums: criticism of Leopold Kompert in, 101–3; history of, 6, 26, 111, 112; literary criticism in, 36, 42–43, 101–3, 105–6, 116–17, 146, 157–58; as medium for production and dissemination of literature, 8–9, 26–27, 31, 32, 66–68, 90, 117, 120–21, 204; and quest for German-Jewish novel, 157–58 Anderson, Benedict, 14, 109, 167 Andrassy, Georg, 82, 83 Antisemitism, 22, 91, 92, 95–96, 158; in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, 189; in Freytag’s Soll und Haben, 136–37; in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, 57, 186 Appleton’s Journal, 96–97 Ascension, Diego de la, 56 Ashkenazic culture, 1–2, 72–73 Auerbach, Berthold, 20, 24, 101, 105, 214n41. Works: Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, 73, 82, 84, 87, 90, 169; Spinoza, 27, 227n22

Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, 94 Austro-Hungarian Empire: Jewish emancipation in, 12; role of German language and culture among Jews in, 15; as context for Kompert’s works, 73, 81, 84, 92, 93 Baader, Benjamin Maria, 21, 165 Baptism, 28, 44, 164, 180, 191. See also conversion. Barrios, Daniel Levi De, 55–56, 58–59 Beautiful Jewess, as figure, 124, 145 Belles lettres, definition of, 8, 66–68. See also fiction; Jewish literature. Ben-Ari, Nitsa, 225n132 Beni Qurayza, 51–53 Benjamin of Tudela, 28, 45, 54 Benjamin, Judah P., literary depiction of, 129 Benjamin, Walter, 12 Bernstein, Aron, 74, 140 Bhabha, Homi, 106 Bildung: definition of, 11; and high culture, 15–16, 19, 174, 186; importance in German-Jewish culture, 11–13, 66, 137, 170, 173, 182; role in Jewish popular literature, 16, 19, 39; as secular religion, 12–13 Bildungsroman, 25, 115, 148–49, 154, 206; female Bildungsroman, 152–53; position in German-Jewish culture, 152 Black legend, 33, 33, 41, 55, 58 Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 92 Blume-Siebert, Ludwig, 99

251

252

Index Bock, Sheldon, and Jerry Stein, Fiddler on the Roof, 75 Bodian, Miriam, 56, 223n104 Börne, Ludwig, 19–20 Bourdieu, Pierre, 16, 80 Bourgeois culture: critiques of, 22, 118, 139– 154, 203; role in Jewish acculturation, 2, 20–21, 61–62, 118, 128, 130; role in Jewish literature, 39, 61–65, 79–81, 131, 139, 165–67. See also cult of domesticity. Bourgeois tragedy: revisions of genre in German-Jewish literature, 54, 59–61, 62, 63–65, 68, 123, 127, 144, 190–92 Breuer, Mordechai, 167, 173, 199, 241n7 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 18, 127, 131 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, Leila, or the Siege of Granada, 34; The Last Days of Pompeii, 34 Butler, Benjamin, literary depiction of, 129

128, 142, 143, 144, 145–46, 149–52; in Kompert’s ghetto fiction, 86, 87, 95–96; in orthodox fiction, 161, 164, 175–76, 178, 180, 185, 186, 190, 194; among prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals, 20, 40, 119, 149, 151, 202. See also Marranos. Conversos, 28, 29, 35, 42, 56, 206. See also Marranos. Cooper, James Fennimore, 32 Crypto-Jews, 29, 44, 45–46. See also Marranos. Cult of domesticity, celebrated and promoted by German-Jewish fiction, 25, 54, 59, 61–65, 68, 128–32, 159, 165–66, 192, 204; critiques of in German-Jewish fiction, 133, 139–54 Cultural capital, 16, 20, 80–81, 109, 213n34 Curtius, Ernst, 201 Czynski, Jean, 210n13

Catholicism: in nineteenth-century Germany, 21; in Jewish fiction, 32–33, 35, 40, 44–45, 49, 59, 95–96, 189. See also Black legend; Spanish Inquisition. Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens, 6 Chase, Jefferson, 210n31 Chanukah, 134, 184 Christianity, 96, 171; supersession of Judaism, 95–96, 97–98. See also conversion. Christmas, 99 Classical drama, 54, 57, 58, 62, 145, 167, 191 Classicism, 61, 62–63, 78–79, 110 Classics: creation of Jewish literary classics, 17, 25, 36–38, 43, 54–55, 80–81, 148, 152–54, 203–24; emergence of German classics, 11–13, 16, 31, 37; role of German classics in Jewish life and literature, 11, 12–13, 16–18, 54–55, 68–71, 167, 182, 185, 202–3. Cohen, Richard, 76 Cohen, Sabbathai, 163 Conversion: in general European fiction, 33, 34, 124; in Jewish fiction about the Spanish Inquisition, 41, 42, 44, 46, 57; in Jewish romance fiction, 113, 124–25,

D’Aguilar, Diego, 47 Dauber, Jeremy, 211n16 Davidson, Lina, 149 Davis, Lennard J., 246n69 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 189–90 Dickens, Charles, 133; Oliver Twist, 189 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm, 96 Donau, Die, 93 Dumas, Alexandre, 113, 114, 185 Edwards, H. Sutherland, 92 Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda, 192–97: German translation of, 196; as reworked by Marcus Lehmann, 193–97 Elizabeth, Queen, literary depictions of, 56–58 Ellenson, David, 162, 199 Enlightenment, 1, 11, 35, 96 Ettlinger, Jacob, 158 Feldheim Publishing House, 197 Félix, Elisabeth Rachel, 145–47 Feuchtwanger, Lion, Die Jüdin von Toledo, 28 Fiction, critical views toward, 15–16, 31, 66–67, 112–14. See also reading.

Index Fiddler on the Roof, 75 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary¸18, 192 Foa, Eugénie, 9, 215n5 Formstecher, Salomon: as novelist, 11, 140; vision of realist novel, 133–34. Works: Buchenstein und Cohnberg, 117, 128, 133– 39, 154, 156, 238n67; reception of, 137–39; Der Freitagabend, 6, 111, 234n18; “Der geraubte Sohn,” 133; Religion des Geistes, 133, 238n69 Fortnightly Review, 92 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, A Young Girl Reading, 3, 5 France, Jewish literature in, 7, 94 Frankel, Zacharias, 100 Fränkel, David, 5 Frankl, Ludwig August, 82, 140, 221n71 Franzos, Karl Emil: views on Kompert, 74, 84–85, 108; Der Pojaz, 22 Freitagabend, Der, 6, 111, 127, 133, 234n18 French Revolution, 1, 4, 12, 169 Freytag, Gustav: and antisemitism, 136, 238n70; Soll und Haben, 18, 134, 136–37, Fritzsche, Peter, 228n23 Galchinsky, Michael, 215n5 Gartenlaube, Die, 25, 98–100, 101, 108, 115, 168; attitude toward Kompert, 98–99 Geiger, Abraham, 90, 101, 102, 157 Geiger, Ludwig, 13, 157–59, 161, 162, 167, 200 Gender: and reading fiction; 2–4, 11, 21, 112–13, 121–22, 147, 165–66; and idealization of marriage, 128, 130–32; role of women in Judaism, 62–64 German language: adopted by Jews, 2, 31, 81, 83, 187; as Jewish lingua franca, 15 German-Jewish literature; emergence of, 1–11, 27–28; legacy of, 21–22, 23, 204–7; translations of, 9–10, 27, 36, 70, 73, 118, 161, 206. See also Jewish literature. German-Jewish press, history of, 5–7, 159–60 German-Jewish subculture, 12–16, 106–9, 198–99, 206 Ghetto, history of term, 75–76, 103, 105

Ghetto tale, 72–110; development of after Kompert, 74–75; position in GermanJewish culture 4, 70–71, 114, 157–78; tragic nature of, 24, 86–87, 89–90, 108 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: role in German and German-Jewish culture, 12–13, 19, 54, 56, 202–3. Works: Egmont, 54, 60; Faust, 18, 37, 69, 202; Iphigenie auf Tauris,18, 62–63; Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 4, 17; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 61 Goldbaum, Wilhelm, 105–6 Gotzmann, Andreas, 209n6, 228n27 Governesses, in nineteenth-century Germany, 130–31; in German-Jewish fiction, 130–32 Graetz, Heinrich, Geschichte der Juden, 8, 51, 151 Greek culture, 61, 62–63, 78–79, 186 Grisham, John, 55, 160 Guggenheim, Sara Hirsch: as pioneering woman writer, 139, 159, 165–66; prominence in Jeschurun, 174–75; reception of works 161–62, 165; use of pen name Friedrich Rott, 160. Works: Angela, 189; “Aus der Gegenwart,” 174–75, 176–77; “Aus der Gegenwart II,” 175–76, 190–92; “Aus der Judengasse,” 174; Licht- und Schattenbilder 175, 183–84; Risse, 182 Gutzkow, Karl, 140 Halevi, Jehuda, 28, 45, 54 Hammerstein, Oscar, 132 Happy endings, 17, 25, 40–41, 60 Hauschner, Auguste, Die Familie Lowositz, 22, 118, 155, 158 “Haw, Haw!” (anonymous), 185 Hebbel, Friedrich, 19, 60, 140 Hebrew language, 2, 52, 96, 165 Hebrew literature, 9, 161 Hebrew translations of German-Jewish literature, 9–10, 27, 36, 70, 73, 118, 161 Heine, Heinrich, 19–20, 169; criticized in orthodox fiction, 181–83; Der Rabbi von Bacherach, 27

253

254

Index Herder, Johann Gottfried, 56, 66 Hermann, Georg, Jettchen Gebert, 22, 118, 155, 158 Hertz, Deborah, 214n41 Herzl, Theodor, 22; Altneuland, 22, 158 Heuberger, Georg, 232n81 Heun, Carl Gottlieb Samuel. See H. Clauren. High culture: defined in opposition to popular literature, 15–16; strategic alliances with in Jewish literature, 17–18, 24, 54–64; suspicions toward in orthodox fiction, 181–82 Hirsch, Isaak: comments on Jewish literature, 169–74; on Kompert, 100 Hirsch, Samson Raphael: call for production of Jewish literature, 169, 174; as editor of Jeschurun, 6, 100, 159–60, 169; and modern orthodox movement, 6, 165, 169, 182, 199; Torah im derekh eretz, 165; on women’s education and women’s role in Judaism, 176 Hirschfeld, Gustav, 201–2 Historical fiction, 26–71: dubious status of in nineteenth-century Germany, 37, 39, 157; role among orthodox Jews, 160, 188; as preferred genre of German-Jewish literature, 72, 114, 117; significance of Sir Walter Scott for German historical fiction, 33–34 Horch, Hans Otto, 210n10, 238n74 Hyman, Paula, 21 Ibn-Esra, Abraham, 28, 54 Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur: as disseminator of Jewish fiction, 8, 36, 72, 114–15, 140, 146, 153, 201; reform biases of, 171–72; role in German-Jewish life, 6–7, 8, 114, 115–16 Irving, Washington, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, 34 Isabella, Queen, literary depictions of, 34, 42, 44, 46–47, 49, 57 Islam, 28, 33, 35, 65, 51, 171, 221n63 Israelit, Der: history of, 6, 102, 159–60; as medium for production and

dissemination of literature, 23, 36, 160, 161–62, 166, 168–69, 177; praise for George Eliot in, 193, 196, 197; praise for Kompert in, 102, 172, 187; reflections on literature in, 168, 172; subordinate place of fiction in, 163 Israelitisches Familienblatt, 23 Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin, 32, 121 Jacobowski, Ludwig, Werther der Jude, 17, 22, 158 Jellinek, Adolf, 6, 114 Jensen, Wilhelm, Die Juden zu Köln, 157 Jeschurun: criticism of Kompert in, 100; debates about literature in, 167, 168–175; history of, 6, 159, 241n9; as medium for production and dissemination of literature, 159–60, 162, 174–75 Jewish emancipation: attitude of German liberals toward, 91; as context for German-Jewish literature, 66, 77, 93–94; as depicted in German-Jewish literature, 141, 144, 163; history of 12, 93 Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, 160 Jewish literature: challenge posed to orthodox Judaism, 168–75; didactic nature of, 173, 175–81; emergence of, 1–11, 27–29; in England, 9, 27–28, 29, 41, 42–43, 74; and feminization of Jewish culture, 21, 165–67; in France, 9, 74; and Jewish identity, 10; in Ladino, 9; new role in modernity, 10, 38–39, 66–68, 81, 106, 108, 162–67, 198–200; problems of definition, 1, 7–8, 10, 66–67; as theorized by Ludwig and Phöbus Philippson, 38– 39, 65–68; as transnational phenomenon, 8–10. See also German-Jewish literature; Hebrew literature; Yiddish literature. Jewish Publication Society, 105 Jost, Isaac, 6, 114 Jüdische Presse, 161 Jüdische Universal-Bibliothek, 36, 146 Jüdisches Volksblatt: history of, 6, 48; as medium for production and dissemination of literature, 48, 127;

Index reflections on literature in, 111–13, 115–17 Jung, Alexander, 140, 141 Kalendar und Jahrbuch für Israeliten, 6, 74, 90 Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics of, 15, 70, 113; role in German-Jewish culture, 12, 21, 202 Kaplan, Marion, 21, 155 Karpeles, Gustav, 230n51, 238n74; critique of Ludwig Philippson’s fiction, 161; praise for orthodox fiction, 161–62, 165, 241n17 Katz, Jacob, 76 Kayserling, Meyer: praise for Philippson’s Jakob Tirado, 36, 58; on Rahel Meyer, 238n76; on Spanish-Jewish history and literature, 51, 55, 56, 169 Keil, Ernst, 25, 98 Kitsch, 61 Kohn, Salomon, Gabriel, 188 Kompert, Leopold: biography, 73–74, 82–84; editor of Kalendar und Jahrbuch für Israeliten, 6; influence of, 74–75, 146; publication history of complete works, 90–91; reception of among Jews, 100–6, 108–9; reception of among orthodox Jews, 169, 170, 172, 187; reception of among non-Jews, 90–100; relation to Berthold Auerbach, 24, 73, 82, 84, 87, 90, 101, 105; relation to Rahel Meyer, 141; relation to Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 4, 76, 87–88; reviews of, 76–79, 90–106; self-perception as German writer, 73, 81–82; tragic nature of his ghetto fiction, 86–87, 89–90, 97, 108; translation of works, 73. Works: “Alt Babele,” 82, 90; Aus dem Ghetto, 4, 73–78, 82–83, 87, 93, 94, 101, 169; Böhmische Juden, 73, 85, 94, 95, publication history of, 74; “Der Dorfgeher,” 85, 87–90, 95, 97–98; Geschichten einer Gasse, 73; “Judith die Zweite,” 82; “Die Kinder des Randars,” 83, 85–87, 95; Märchen aus dem Ghetto, 82, 83; Neue Geschichten aus dem Ghetto, 73; “Ohne Bewilligung,” 82–83, 90; “Eine Verlorene,” 95–96

Königshofen, A., Auf Irrwegen, 184, 185, 187 Kotzebue, August von, 17, 153, 185 Krobb, Florian, 28, 89, 155, 210n10, 217n17, 228n27, 229n34 Kronfeld, Chana, 247n94 Kulke, Eduard, 74, 114; praise for Kompert, 104–5 Kürnberger, Ferdinand, 93, 94, 98 Ladino, literature in, 9 La Fontaine, August, 114, 153 Lässig, Simone, 213n34 La Roche, Sophie von, Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, 4 Lehmann, Emil: enthusiasm for Kompert and Oppenheim, 77–79, 80, 87; as radical reformer, 77, 109 Lehmann, Jon, 168–69, 173, 197 Lehmann, Marcus: career as writer and publicist, 11, 24, 159–62, 164–65, 168–69, 245n64; compared to John Grisham, 55, 160; criticism of Formstecher’s Buchenstein und Cohnberg, 137; criticism of Ludwig and Phöbus Philippson, 172; criticism of Mosenthal’s Deborah, 169; as editor of Der Israelit, 6, 23, 102, 159–60; plagiarism in, 194–97; praise for George Eliot, 196; praise for Kompert, 172; views on Jewish literature, 137, 169, 172, 173; translations of works, 161. Works: “Elivire,” 179–81, publication and translation history of, 246n71; “Des Königs Eidam,” 163–65, 177, publication and translation history of, 243n24; Die Familie Y Aguillar, 28, 41, 47, 55, 206; publication and translation history of, 36, 219n41; “Gabriel,” 182, 187; Gegenströmungen, 184, 192–97; Graf oder Jude, 249n117; König Monmouth, 245n64; “Das Licht der Diaspora,” 243n28; Zur rechten Zeit, 246n70; Säen und Ernten, 160–62, 185–87; “Eine Seder-Nacht in Madrid,” 29; “Das Testament,” 181–82, 187; “Unmöglich,” 182–83, 189–90, publication and translation history of, 245n66; Vater und Sohn, 184–85, 187;

255

256

Index Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 24, 166, 192; “Die Verlassene,” 177–79; “Vorurtheile,” 249n117 Leibrock, August, Der Cardinal, 33, 34–35, 39–40 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: and bourgeois tragedy, 59–60; place in German-Jewish culture, 12, 69, 202. Works: Emilia Galotti, 18, 59–60, 61, 190–92; Die Juden, 249n117; Miss Sara Sampson, 59; Nathan der Weise, 247n93 Lewald, Fanny, 20, 145; reception in German-Jewish press, 119; Jenny, 119, 134 Lewis, Matthew, The Monk, 33 Liberalism, 91–100, 119, 204 Libraries: history of institution of lending library in Germany, 31–32, 37; Jewish library collections, 7, 8, 114, 138, 155; perceived dangers of lending libraries as agents of distribution of popular literature, 31, 112–113, 148; popularity of authors in lending libraries, 33, 34 Liebesroman, see romance fiction Lorm, Hieronymus, 140, 230n51 Love: romantic love as guarantor of Jewish continuity, 60, 120–32, 135, 138–39, 186, 205; romantic love as threat to Jewish continuity, 124, 142, 156. See also conversion; romance fiction.

Jewish literature, 13, 20; and happy endings, 17, 25, 40, 41, 60, 65; history of melodramatic mode, 17; role in Inquisition fiction, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44, 54, 55, 60, 65, 68; role in orthodox fiction, 125, 159, 160, 174, 175, 177, 185, 187, 191, 192 Mendelssohn, Moses, 2, 240n107. Meyer, Rahel: critique of middlebrow culture, 25, 139–55; biography and history of career, 140–41. Works: In Banden frei, 114–15, 147–54, 155, 201–2, as Bildungsroman, 148–54, reception of, 148; Rahel, 145–47, 154; Zwei Schwestern, 117, 133, 140–145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, Middlebrow: applicability of term to nineteenth-century literature culture, 19, 37, 68–70, 116, 174; definition of, 17–19 Miron, Dan, 211n16 Modernization: of Jewish life, 1–2, 24; and religious culture, 20–21; role of literature in, 38–39, 65–68, 162 Modlewski, Tania, 235n26 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 15, 113 Mosenthal, Salomon, 140, 169, 170 Mosse, George, 11–12, 13, 206 Mühlbach, Luise, 140 Müller, Joel, 226n10 Mundt, Thomas, 140

Maimonides, Moses, 28, 45, 50, 54 Marlitt, Eugenie, 61, 115 Marranos: as depicted in Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars, 28–29, 44–47; as depicted in German-Jewish literature in general, 29, 47; historical experience of, 29; pejorative connotations of term, 217n13 Marriage: between relatives, 155–56; civil marriage, 119, 180; as financial transaction, 128, 152, 176; idealization of, 61, 118–19, 121–39; as literary phenomenon, 119–20, 155–56, 192. See also cult of domesticity. Melodrama: black-and-white ethical universe of, 65, 68, 137, 138, 159; as constitutive feature of German-

Nasi, Joseph, 51, 205 Nation, The, 91–92 Neal, Lynn S., 236n26 Neisser, Regina, 154, 220n58 Neuda, Fanny, 139–40 Nextbook, 204 Nostalgia: as agent of modernization, 79–80; critical views toward, 50, 78–79, 101, 102 Nunes, Marie, literary depictions of, 29, 56–60, 65; myths about in de Barrios, 56 Oppenheim, Moritz Daniel: and bourgeois culture, 4, 7, 228n27; idealization of ghetto life, 108; in Die Gartenlaube, 98; relation to Kompert, 4, 76, 87,

Index 104. Works: Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben, 2–4, 76, 77, 103–4; Der Dorfgeher, 87–88; Das Laubhütten-Fest, 7; Sabbath-Ruhe, 2–4, 11 Orthodox Jewish press, 158–160; history of literature in, 159–60, 174–75 Orthodox Judaism: critique of reformoriented fiction, 168, 170–73; demonized in reform Jewish literature, 137–38; distinctive forms of literature in, 124–25, 139, 157–200; scholarship on, 162, 199–200; separatist movement in, 198, 248n12; views on Kompert in, 100–102 Ost und West¸ 60 Paoli, Betty, 93–94, 98 Palleske, Emil, 245 Parush, Iris, 209n5 Peretz, Y. L., 74 Philippson, Ludwig: attitudes toward Kompert, 101–2; collaboration with brother Phöbus, 26–27, 30–31, 38–39; criticized by Gustav Karpeles, 161; criticized in the orthodox press, 161, 172–73; and culture of lending library, 31– 32; and romance fiction, 116–17, 120–33; views on nostalgia, 79; views on role of Jewish literature, 38–39, 65–68 ,116–17. Editorial projects: Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, 6, 8, 11, 25, 26–27, 30–31, 32, 90, 101–2; Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur, 6–7, 72, 112, 114; Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin, 32, 121; Jüdisches Volksblatt, 6, 48, 111–13, 115–17. Literary works: “Die Begegnung,” 125–26, 154; “Die drei Brüder,” 36, 48–54, 205; publication history of, 36; “Eine Familiengeschichte,” 126–27; “Förderung und Hemmniß,” 124; “Die Gegensätze,” 120–24, 126, 128; “Die Gouvernante,” 130–32; Jakob Tirado, 28, 29, 35, 36, 42, 54, 55–61, 69; reliance on de Barrios, 55–56, 58–59; publication and translation history of, 36, 219n39; Mariamne, die letzte Hasmonäerin, 172; “Die Union,” 128–130; Saron, 26–27, 36, 38–39, 114,

154–55; “Speicher, Bude und Salon,” 124 Philippson, Phöbus: collaborations with brother Ludwig, 26–27, 30–31, 38–39; views on role of Jewish literature, 38–39. Works: Die Marannen, 8, 26–27, 29–30, 61–65, 163; gender roles in, 61–65; as origin of modern Jewish belles lettres, 9, 26–27, 31, 35–36; publication and translation history of, 27, 215n6; relation to Sir Walter Scott, 34; Der unbekannte Rabbi, 171–73; “Die Vertreibung der Juden,” 29, 30, 32. See also Ludwig Philippson, Saron. Philipson, David, 105 Piza, J., translation of Aguilar’s Vale of Cedars, 42–43 Popular literature, 13, 15–18, 31–32; critical attitudes toward, 111–120; defined in relation to high culture, 15–16; history of, 32, 35; as Volksliteratur, 24, 73 Print culture: and Jewish acculturation, 2; and German-Jewish literary culture; 14–15, 30–31, 108–9; and German-Jewish press, 5–8; and popular literature, 13 Prutz, Robert, 37 Purdy, Daniel, 16 Rabbis: as detectives in fiction, 55, 160, 178, 179; literary depictions of, 50–51, 128, 160, 163–65, 135, 182, 183–84, 185, 187, 194; as narrators in the work of Marcus Lehmann, 177–80, 181; as novelists, 15, 21, 133, 160, 165, 177–80; as publicists, 6–7, 26–27, 32, 100, 111, 137–38, 158–59, 159–60. See also Salomon Formstecher; Marcus Lehmann; Ludwig Philippson. Radway, Janice, 18, 235n26 Ragen, Naomi, 204–7, The Ghost of Hannah Mendes, 205–6 Ragussis, Michael, 34 Van Rahden, Till, 14 Reading: by adolescents, 10, 21, 139, 161, 188; debates about dangers of, 111–19, 168–75, 184–85; as female pastime, 2–4, 11, 21, 113, 120–21, 165–66; reading rage and addictive reading, 30–31, 112–14, 184–85

257

258

Index Reception studies, difficulties faced by, 23–24, 168–69, 202 Reclam publishing house, 32, 36, 37, 69 Reform Judaism, as critiqued in orthodox fiction, 175, 177, 178, 183–84 Religious education, 122, 124, 175–77 Revolution of 1848, 77, 91, 93–94, 144, 180 Revue des deux mondes, 94–96, 108 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa 89–90; Pamela, 118 Richter, Jean Paul, 183 Riesser, Gabriel, 144 Robertson, Ritchie, 214n44 Rodgers, Richard, 132 Roemer, Nils, 114 Romance fiction, 114–55; critique of in oeuvre of Rahel Meyer, 139–54; history of genre in Germany, 114; position of in German-Jewish culture, 24–25, 116–17, 154–46; used to promote Jewish community, 118–20, 120–139, 154–46; as women’s literature, 120–24 Rott, Friedrich. See Sara Hirsch Guggenheim. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Julie, 118, 153 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 18 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, 74 Saintsbury, George, 92 Samuels, Maurice, 9, 215n5 Schiller, Friedrich: aesthetic writings, 15, 39, 53, 84–85, 113; role in German and German-Jewish culture, 12–13, 19, 37, 54, 56, 202–3. Works: Don Carlos, 55, 182, 183; “Die Götter Griechenlands,” 78, 186; Jungfrau von Orleans, 183; Kabale und Liebe, 60; Maria Stuart, 57, 59; Die Räuber, 185 Schnitzler, Arthur, Der Weg ins Freie, 22, 158 Schorsch, Ismar, 28, 72, 106–7, 209n6 Schragge, Ludwig, as pseudonym for Ludwig Philippson, 126 Scott, Walter, historical novels of, 32; 33, 34, 47; Ivanhoe, 18, 33, 34, 58 Sebald, W.G., 89 Sephardic Jewry, idealization of, 28–30,

43–44, 49–50, 51, 65, 72, 205–6 Serialized fiction: general history of, 13, 32, 112, 233n4; in the Jewish press, 8, 23, 31, 32, 117, 163; in the orthodox press, 159–161, 168–69, 175 Sermon on the Mount, 96 Sforim, Mendele Mocher. See S. Y. Abramovitsh. Shakespeare, William, role in German culture, 57. Works: The Merchant of Venice, 18, 58–59, 186; Romeo and Juliet, 120, 180 Shedletzky, Itta, 73, 167, 210n10, 241n7 Sinsheimer, Hermann, Maria Nunnez, 28 Skolnik, Jonathan, 16, 54, 57–58, 222n92, 223n106, 227n22, 247n94 Sonntagsblätter, 82, 230n56 Sorkin, David, 12, 13–14, 107–8, 210n8, 214n41 Sound of Music¸The, 132 Spain: romantic idealization of, 33, 43, 46, 51, challenged by Jewish writers, 53, 55. See also Sephardic Jewry, Spanish Inquisition. Spanish Inquisition, in general popular culture, 32–35; in Jewish literature, 26–71 Stauben, Daniel, 74, 226n7 Stein, Jerry, and Sheldon Bock, Fiddler on the Roof, 75 Stein, Leopold: as commentator on Oppenheim’s portraits, 3–4, 88; as coeditor of Der Freitagabend, 6, 111, 133, 234n18 Sue, Eugène, 112, 113, 185; Le Juif errant, 233n4 Sulamith, 5, 6 Taillandier, Saint-René, review of Kompert, 94–96, 97, 98, 108 Talmud: as depicted in German-Jewish literature, 128, 135, 163, 184, 249n117; role in nineteenth-century German-Jewish culture, 21; role in traditional Jewish culture, 2, 128, 163 Tisha B’Av, 48, 50, 177 Tolstoy, Leo, 18

Index Torah: role in Jewish life, 2, 163, 168; as represented in Jewish literature, 52–53, 63, 163 Torah im derekh eretz, 165 Tragedy: general absence of in GermanJewish literature, 17, 64; role in ghetto fiction, 24, 86–87, 89–90, 97, 108; role in Rahel Meyer’s fiction, 144, 145, 146. See also bourgeois tragedy. Translations, of German-Jewish literature, 9–10, 27, 36, 70, 73, 118, 161, 206 treue Zionswächter, Der, 158–59, 232n77, 241n6; literature in, 169 Trivialliteratur, problematic designation of, 16, 31 Tsene-rene, 2 Valman, Nadia, 218n31, 236n37 Varnhagen, Rahel Levin, 13, 19–20, 149; as criticized by Rahel Meyer, 149–54; in relation to other salonières, 150–51 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 149 Vick, Brian, 91 Volkov, Shulamit, 13, 203 Wagner, Richard, 92 Wasserman, Henry, 98

Wassermann, Jakob, Die Juden von Zirndorf, 22, 157, 158 Weill, Alexandre, 74, 226n7 Weissberg, Liliane, 232n81 Wieland, Christoph Marin, Don Sylvio, 184 Williamson, George, 212 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 61 Wittemann, M. Theresia, 228 Wolf, Gerson, views on Kompert, 103, 104–5 Wolf, Joseph, 5 Wurzbuch, Constant von, 93, 231n69 Yiddish language, 2, 83, 84, 95, 187; literary use of, 73, 136–7 Yiddish literature, 2, 9, 74, 115 Yiddish translations of German-Jewish literature, 9–10, 27, 36, 70, 73, 118, 161 Yom Kippur, 176 Zangwill, Israel, 74 Zemlinsky, Adolf von, 40, 221n71; “Die Rache des Juden,” 40–41 Zimmern, Helen, review of Kompert, 96–98 Zionism, 22, 23, 158 Zunz, Leopold, 90, 140

259