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

in Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

This introductory chapter discusses the emergence of “Jewish literature” in the nineteenth century. In this period when Jews were rapidly ascending into the ranks of the middle classes, undertaking ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the emergence of “Jewish literature” in the nineteenth century. 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, they also launched their own form of secular culture: fiction written by Jews for Jews that 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 cultural identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. It is this literature that is the subject of this book. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

A Translator Culture

in Faithful Renderings: Jewish-Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation

This chapter examines German–Jewish culture through the lens of translation, beginning with Moses Mendelssohn's Bible translation and ending with the translation theory of Walter Benjamin. While ... More

This chapter examines German–Jewish culture through the lens of translation, beginning with Moses Mendelssohn's Bible translation and ending with the translation theory of Walter Benjamin. While previous scholarship has tended to conceptualize German–Jewish translation in the light of cultural integration or symbiosis, it is argued that the formulation of translation as a variety of cultural encounter conceals a number of tensions and asymmetries in the German–Jewish translation project. Benjamin's model of an interlinear Bible translation, along with Buber and Rosenzweig's attempt at creating a German Bible in which the Hebrew original would somehow be visible, can be traced to philosophical and political circumstances comparable to those that shaped Aquila's work. The “translator cultures” of Hellenism and German–Jewish modernism divested the sacred tongue of what had been its correlate: untranslatability. In this cultural context, translating the sacred necessarily produces a difficult or incomprehensible text as guarantee that translation has not succumbed to the chimera of linguistic transparency or the demands of cultural assimilation.Less

The Idea of Czernowitz

Marianne Hirsch

in Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

This chapter introduces the “idea of Czernowitz,” which featured the adherence to German as its central ingredient. It examines the ideologues of Romanianization, which used the educational system as ... More

This chapter introduces the “idea of Czernowitz,” which featured the adherence to German as its central ingredient. It examines the ideologues of Romanianization, which used the educational system as the primary institutional medium to change the predominantly multiethnic Northern Bukowina into a province populated mostly by Romanians. The chapter then discusses the Jewish resistance to Romanianization and Romanian anti-Semitism. It also studies the story of “Die Buche,” which symbolized the unexpected changes of Bukowina's German-Jewish culture during the interwar period.Less

Berlin: Between the Scheunenviertel and the Romanisches Café

in Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe

This chapter explores the emergence of modernist Hebrew literature in Berlin. Between 1920 and 1925, Berlin was a major center of Hebrew literary activity. A very distinguished group of East European ... More

This chapter explores the emergence of modernist Hebrew literature in Berlin. Between 1920 and 1925, Berlin was a major center of Hebrew literary activity. A very distinguished group of East European Hebrew and Yiddish writers immigrated to Berlin, where they lived, wrote, and published their works. The chapter considers the role of the city in a number of different contexts: Berlin as historical center of Hebrew literature; Berlin as a locus for Hebrew and Yiddish publishing enterprise; and Berlin as a center for a distinctive German-Jewish culture.Less

Mirror-Man

in The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

This chapter examines the revealing affinities between the works of Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka. It suggests that the affinities between Kraus and Kafka will help us to situate Kraus' anti-journalism, ... More

This chapter examines the revealing affinities between the works of Karl Kraus and Franz Kafka. It suggests that the affinities between Kraus and Kafka will help us to situate Kraus' anti-journalism, or rather to re-situate it, within the world of German-Jewish modernism. This chapter analyzes how Kraus framed his style in critical relation to certain tendencies in German-Jewish culture and considers how key formal features of Die Fackel connect with Kraus' radical authorial self-fashioning.Less

“My 1933”

Hermann Levin Goldschmidt

in The Legacy of German Jewry

This chapter discusses “My 1933”, the last work written by Hermann Levin Goldschmidt about the German Jewry. The central text of this collection represents a different kind of self-assertion achieved ... More

This chapter discusses “My 1933”, the last work written by Hermann Levin Goldschmidt about the German Jewry. The central text of this collection represents a different kind of self-assertion achieved through a searing act of self-examination. Written in the form of an inner dialogue, Goldschmidt addresses to himself the challenging questions faced by his generation of survivors. Instead of combining accident and destiny that would leave German Jewish culture behind as a historical relic, Goldschmidt took the implicit and explicit voices of critique directed at German Jews in post-war, making it part of an inner debate.Less

Conclusion: The Afterlife of Anti-Journalism

in The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study of Karl Kraus' anti-journalism. It suggests that while Kraus' anti-journalism alienates contemporary readers, tracing its formation prompts us to ... More

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study of Karl Kraus' anti-journalism. It suggests that while Kraus' anti-journalism alienates contemporary readers, tracing its formation prompts us to rethink issues that have immediate actuality in ongoing discussions of German-Jewish culture. Though Kraus made use of anti-Semitic language, he was moved by and excelled at chronicling moments in which large mechanisms of injustice bore down on individuals whom he saw as defenseless. An example of this is Die Fackel, which abounds with passionate and colorful interventions on behalf of people who were suffering as a result of bigotry or chauvinism or the systemic hypocrisy in fin-de-siècle Austrian society.Less

Love and Bildung for Hannah Arendt

Gabriel Motzkin

in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem

There is a story that has been told about German–Jewish culture, which is that German Jews were uniquely interested in Bildung. They adopted the ideal of self-cultivation, of being educated people, ... More

There is a story that has been told about German–Jewish culture, which is that German Jews were uniquely interested in Bildung. They adopted the ideal of self-cultivation, of being educated people, as a symbol of the status which they had achieved. According to this story, they used Bildung to compensate for the lack of social definition, for their being what Hannah Arendt so trenchantly called pariahs. Bildung gave them an entrée into a universal social class, one not defined by birth. Yet this universal class was not defined by achievement, for the way Bildung was to be acquired is qualitative, and not quantitative. Bildung was supposed to reflect one's inner worth. This story became popular in post-World War II German–Jewish historiography. Its narrative was perhaps inevitably tinged with an ambivalent nostalgia, a retrospective yearning for a finer past that was constrained by an awareness of that past's tragic culmination. Not all German–Jewish intellectuals of the postwar era shared this nostalgia. Many postwar intellectual trajectories can be evaluated in terms of a deep skepticism toward the ideal of Bildung, a skepticism that also permeated Hannah Arendt's prewar portrayal of Rahel Varnhagen's emotional biography.Less

The Stories of Gershom Scholem

Amir Engel

in Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography

This chapter explains the novelty of the book’s approach over and against the existing literature in the field. It does so by posing the fundamental question regarding Scholem, namely, why is Scholem ... More

This chapter explains the novelty of the book’s approach over and against the existing literature in the field. It does so by posing the fundamental question regarding Scholem, namely, why is Scholem so well known, even as he was mostly a scholar of a decidedly narrow field of knowledge? And why is he still read today? This chapter suggests that in different ways, the scholarly literature on Scholem focused on the philosophical underpinnings of his work. Scholem, it is often argued, is important because his views on Jewish revival, Zionism, language or historiography. This chapter seeks to expose the fallacies and problems of this approach. And it discusses the justifications, the advantages and disadvantages, in reading Scholem, not philosophically, but rather as a story-teller. Scholem it is argued did not merely expose truth that lay hidden in the old manuscripts of Jewish esoteric tradition, but recreated this tradition for his audience and in response to many of the existential questions of his generation.Less