Dreaming of Michelangelo

Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme

Asher Biemann

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804784368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Jüdische Literaturkritik

Dreaming of Michelangelo is the first book-length study to explore the intellectual and cultural affinities between modern Judaism and the life and work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It argues that Jewish intellectuals found themselves in the image of Michelangelo as an "unrequited lover" whose work expressed loneliness and a longing for humanity's response. The modern Jewish imagination thus became consciously idolatrous. Writers brought to life—literally—Michelangelo's sculptures, seeing in them their own worldly and emotional struggles. The Moses statue in particular became an archetype of Jewish liberation politics as well as a central focus of Jewish aesthetics. And such affinities extended beyond sculpture: Jewish visitors to the Sistine Chapel reinterpreted the ceiling as a manifesto of prophetic socialism, devoid of its Christian elements. According to Biemann, the phenomenon of Jewish self-recognition in Michelangelo's work offered an alternative to the failed promises of the German enlightenment. Through this unexpected discovery, he rethinks German Jewish history and its connections to Italy, the Mediterranean, and the art of the Renaissance.

1

The Unrequited Eros

MICHELANGELO AND THE JEWISH LOVE FOR ITALY

S’ io t’amo, e non ti costa,

Perdona a me, come io a tanta noia,

Che fuor di chi m’uccide vuol ch’ i’ muoia.

[I love, to you it is no burden,

Forgive me, as I do this misery

That wills I die outside who murders me.]

—Michelangelo, Rime, no. 122¹

Ist die Liebe selber eine Reise, in gänzlich neues Leben,

so wird der Wert der Fremde, der gemeinsam erfahrenen,

durch sie verdoppelt.

[If love is itself a voyage into entirely new life,

then it doubles the value of strange lands experienced together]

—Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung ²

Preamble

The story these pages tell is, for lack of a better word, a story of love. “Love,” of course, is not a term of scientific or historical precision; it speaks, as the Courtier says, “with broken speech and sudden silence.”³ Yet, in this particular story, “love” means something beyond the sentimental. It describes a particular disposition, a declaration of cultural affinity, a sense of elective and, therefore, defiant act of kinship.⁴ “Unhappy lovers,” Gershom Scholem famously called the German Jewish bourgeoisie, whose affair with German culture, with culture as such, never ended in a felicitous marriage.⁵ And Hannah Arendt, in what remains perhaps her most personal book, wrote of Rahel Varnhagen’s unfulfilled though self-fashioning desire to be loved and to be accepted unconditionally—a metaphor, in some sense, of the entire German Jewish experience.⁶

The German Jewish experience shall be our immediate, though not exhaustive, context. There is good reason to object that in this context the language of “love” oversentimentalizes, even trivializes, an encounter that had, in fact, little romantic inclination and remained, as Scholem put it, all but “idealist self-deception.” But both Scholem and Arendt were most unsentimental writers, who wrote of “love” because it seemed to capture, as no other word, the peculiar passion with which German Jewry loved and sought to be loved, pursuing, for lack of better lovers, the muses of literature and art, where love, as Georg Simmel once wrote, was at its most transcendent and invulnerable.⁷ “Their true home,” writes Amos Elon more recently about these unrequited lovers, “was not ‘Germany’ but German culture and language. Their true religion was the bourgeois, Goethean ideal of Bildung.”⁸ This ideal, as many scholars have previously observed, was not one of mere consumption but one that connoted self-formation and creativity. Yet, even then, the picture of acculturated German Jews as solely defined by their pursuit of loftiness remains problematic, for it neglects not only the obvious lives of “uncultured” German Jews and cultured German Germans, but also the similar intellectual pursuits that existed among Jews living in other national cultures. “Culture” as an alternate home is a universal motif of modern Jewish history and, to some extent, of modernity itself. Bildung, though essential to German Jewish history, was not only a German ideal, and German Jews did not pursue only German culture: Their love, while “ardent and endless,” as Scholem wrote, extended the boundaries of “home,” language, and nationality, uprooting its lovers and offering them, even if entirely ethereal, a spiritual refuge of some sort. Indeed, whether or not answered and requited, and whether or not fantasy and self-deception, this cultural love still remained what love tends to be: a fragile fact more than an indestructible feeling, a reality despite reality. Thus, to Scholem, the German Jewish love for Kultur was no feeling at all but a collective attitude, a way of looking at the world and of being toward it that was inseparable from a certain cultural eroticism and a certain Jewish dream.

Cultural eroticism as a form of affinity and looking at the world is the background of this study. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) make clear to us that affinity, when elective, is an index not only of difficult, perhaps unfulfillable, human love, but also of love’s rebellion and defiance; that it is not only about passions and dreams but also about awareness, somnambulant cognition, and unexpected agency.⁹ The mystery of elective affinity is its gravity and weightlessness, its passion and autonomy. Indeed, as Jonathan Hess reminds us, the Jewish claims to modernity were filled not with silent admiration and attraction, but with polemical initiative and self-assertion.¹⁰ Elective affinities are, in some sense, always heretical, selective and discontented, indicating a state of heightened cultural consciousness. Their passions are not dreamlike and intoxicated but works of wakefulness and confrontation.

If I write about cultural love then it is with this heretical wakefulness in mind. I write about this love not to lament its disappointment, whose tragedy is no secret to us, but because I shall take seriously, for the purpose of this essay, Scholem’s well-worn, yet still strangely uninvestigated, idiom of the unloved lover to reflect upon what it means not to be unloved but to be a “lover.” I shall write, then, about love not because it is a sentimental thing and not because I trust its power to unite humanity, but because it elects, self-fashions, and defies.

Two simultaneous cultural loves, two dreams, are subject of this meditation: the Jewish dream of Michelangelo and, forming no more than its encompassing horizon, a Jewish love for Italy. None of these loves were, of course, exclusive and particularly “Jewish.” Kant, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Rembrandt, even Richard Wagner, to name only a few, were among the cultic fixtures animating the German Jewish imagination and its salient fantasy of redemption through cultural formation. Michelangelo, far from being of merely Jewish interest, had become subject of a broader discourse since his late eighteenth-century “rehabilitation” in Victorian and German literature.¹¹ Already in 1772, lamenting the decline of art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, expressed his hope for art’s modern “revival” through a new appreciation of Michelangelo. By 1790, Reynolds asked from his students to “turn your attention to this exalted Founder and Father of modern Art, of which he was not only the inventor, but which, by the divine energy of his mind, he carried at once to its highest point of possible perfection.”¹² Similar was Goethe’s first praise of the master’s works, and one can trace a literary development from Friedrich Hebbel, whose two-act Michel Angelo premiered in Vienna in 1861, to Longfellow’s dramatic fragment of the same title, written in 1872 and left in his desk drawer until 1883, to Nietzsche and the infamous count of Gobineau, to the works of Rainer Maria Rilke and C. F. Meyer, producing a cultivated image of Michelangelo as “defiant exile” and “slave of passion,” as a “titanic” outcast, strong and vulnerable, an image that was as popular as it was poetic and, in its own imagination, countercultural.¹³ There is no shortage of modern accounts of the artist’s life, such as the seminal works of Herman Grimm (1865), Aurelio Gotti (1876), John Addington Symonds (1893), Carl Justi (1900), Henry Thode (1901), Karl Frey (1907), or Romain Rolland’s Vie de Michel-Ange of 1913; there emerged a new public interest in Michelangelo after the grand four hundred year celebrations of his birthday in 1875;¹⁴ and there is no reason to believe that this fascination should disappear in our time.¹⁵

Likewise, Italy, the supposedly sensuous South, has existed in the minds and longings of northern dreamers for many centuries, among whom were Jewish dreamers too, travelers to the great Italian cities and admirers of its artworks. We normally associate such dreams and fantasies with “colonial” habits in one sense or another. “Wealthy Puritans searching among the brunettes from afar what the world ordered under their own command has cut off from them,” Theodor Adorno once called the northern seekers of the South.¹⁶ Their “love,” he continues, commences only as their “soul” is absent, losing itself to the “soulless as a cipher of the soulful.” This, to Adorno, is the “cycle of bourgeois desire for the naïve,” and Italy, to many travelers, represented just that naïveté.

Yet, the Romantic notion of Fernliebe (love of the faraway),¹⁷ though certainly a factor, cannot do justice to the possibility of cultural Eros as a creative work, and it does not suffice to explain how this Eros functioned in Jewish imagination. Nor can we easily subsume the Jewish love for Michelangelo under its German counterpart, explaining it as merely following the spirit of the time, a German love, then, in Jewish disguise. If there remains something peculiar in the Jewish reception of Michelangelo, a special elective affinity that crossed and blurred the boundaries of both Jewish and German cultures, then it could not have been the attention itself to Michelangelo, but only the form and meaning of the encounter with his life and work. We must, then, look further to understand how love, the most elusive and universal human theme, can be a Jewish variation.

Love

The Jewish love for Michelangelo is “love.” We begin with the simple proposition that there is such a thing as love, love in the lower case, that is, not immortal and exclusive, much less saintly and selfless, but fluid, fleeting, erotic, and capricious, just as one would “love” the Florentine hills, as Simmel wrote in a fragment on this subject, without the desire to live there permanently, nor however, to merely admire them from a distance.¹⁸ Being in love with such love is no methodical act; but neither is it a purely irrational passion. It is, as Simmel put it, a “creative formation of the basic relationship between soul and world,” whereby “soul” meant no more to Simmel, and no less, than “enduring creativity”; or it is, as Hermann Cohen wrote in the Aesthetics of Pure Feeling, a “desire for communion (Mitteilung)” expressing, at the same time, a “flight from the isolation of the self,” the flight of man from himself.¹⁹

What gives meaning and reason to a concept of cultural love is that love, whether requited or left unanswered, does not tolerate subjectivity but is always constitutive of lover and beloved.²⁰ Just as the loving I becomes another to itself, as Simmel writes, so the beloved one becomes, by virtue of the act of love, “another being, emerging from another a priori than the one we knew, feared, revered, or met with indifference.”²¹ Love constitutes as it participates; it changes its object as it establishes it from a ground that was not there before; it is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “world-creating,” or as the sociologist Niklas Luhmann expresses this idea: “It cannot put itself at distance. It participates in its object; and its ‘object’ does not stand still but absorbs the act and changes itself through it.”²² Thus, Simmel, following Kierkegaard, viewed love as “one of the great forming categories of Being,” a category not merely of the mind, but one that genuinely creates its object and itself anew—a reworking of the other that is met by the simultaneous desire to be reworked by the other. “See to it I do not return to me”—fate c’a me stesso più non torni—is the conclusion of one of Michelangelo’s best-known madrigals to his late love, and it captures Simmel’s dialectic of Eros as the constitution of that which is radically other, alien, and even contrary to itself, and the simultaneous desire to encompass, and to be encompassed by, the beloved you, to be one with it (Verschmelzenwollen).²³ “At the height of being in love,” Sigmund Freud would later write, “the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away.”²⁴ And still later Hannah Arendt wrote: “Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.”²⁵

In this dialectic, in love’s yearning for selfhood and, at the same time, for the “encompassing” (umgreifende Etwas), which Freud would have called the “oceanic feeling,” and which Martin Buber understood as das Umfassende, lies, for Simmel, the transcendence of every erotic relationship, the necessity of every love to live by its own laws, removed from the “stream of life,” freed from its vital purpose, in contradiction even to the world. Arendt, therefore, speaks of love’s “total unworldliness” rendering it “perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.”²⁶ But this means that in every love there is, as Simmel writes, also a love of freedom, a life “beyond rootedness,” a restless evolution and “becoming another,” the desire to be “more-than-life.” In this desire lies love’s ability to resist the world, yet also its denial of life, which is, ultimately, the denial of oneself, the “tragic music” that sounds from afar at the doors of Eros.²⁷

We speak of love for lack of a better term; love not as a metaphor, but as a mode...