Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Jonathan M. Hess

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780804774239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which 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 identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.

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 ‘Return 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 deutsch-jüdischen 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 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 Nineteenth-Century 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 Enlightenm...