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The German-Jewish Experience Revisited Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

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The German-Jewish Experience Revisited Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts The German-Jewish Experience Revisited Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts Edited by Vivian Liska Editorial Board Robert Alter, Steven E. Aschheim, Richard I. Cohen, Mark H. Gelber, Moshe Halbertal, Geoffrey Hartman, Moshe Idel, Samuel Moyn, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman, Bernd Witte Volume 3 The German-Jewish Experience Revisited Edited by Steven E. Aschheim Vivian Liska In cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem In cooperation with the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libra- ries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. ISBN 978-3-11-037293-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-036719-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039332-3 ISSN 2199-6962 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: bpk / Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Typesetting: PTP-Berlin, Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Preface The essays in this volume derive partially from the Robert Liberles International Summer Research Workshop of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, 11–25 July 2013. In addition to the papers presented at the workshop, we have included a few extra contributions that round out our reflections. The workshop and the present volume aim at revisiting interesting and important aspects of the German-Jewish experience and evaluating the present state of the field. Senior and junior schol- ars from Israel, Germany, and the United States all contributed to this work. We shall not summarize the arguments and theses of the essays in this collection. After all, what would be the point of reading them if one knows in advance what they are going to say? Readers will, no doubt, perceive some methodological, ana- lytic, generational, and national divergences in these pieces but what emerges clearly is the ongoing vitality of this field, which in many ways is in transition. New paradigms, methods, and approaches co-exist with other more familiar and tried analyses. In the Postscript, we try to provide a retrospective account of the state of things as reflected in this volume. We would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Leo Baeck Institute Jerusalem, particularly the encouragement and organizational help of Dr. Anja Siegemund. We are most grateful to Dr. Ulrike Krauss, our main contact person with our publisher de Gruyter for her commitment to the book series “Perspectives on Jewish texts and contexts” and for accompanying every stage of the produc- tion process of this volume. Above all, we want to thank Dr. Stefani Hoffman, who did much more for this book than her work as text editor would have required. With utmost professionalism and a fine sense for language, she painstakingly went through every line of the manuscript, suggested corrections and revisions at every level and contributed immensely to improving this book. Contents Preface | v Ofri Ilany The Jews as Educators of Humanity – a Christian-Philosemitic Grand Narrative of Jewish Modernity? | 1 Moshe Idel Transfers of Categories: the German-Jewish Experience and Beyond | 15 Bernd Witte German Classicism and Judaism | 45 Sander L. Gilman Aliens vs. Predators: Cosmopolitan Jews vs. Jewish Nomads | 59 Stefan Vogt Between Decay and Doom: Zionist Discourses of “Untergang” in Germany, 1890 to 1933 | 75 Peter Jelavich Popular Entertainment and Mass Media: The Central Arenas of German-Jewish Cultural Engagement | 103 Emily J. Levine Aby Warburg and Weimar Jewish Culture: Navigating Normative Narratives, Counternarratives, and Historical Context | 117 Ofer Ashkenazi The Jewish Places of Weimar Cinema: Reconsidering Karl Grune’s The Street | 135 Jens Hacke Jewish Liberalism in the Weimar Republic? Reconsidering a Key Element of Political Culture in the Interwar Era | 155 Till van Rahden History in the House of the Hangman: How Postwar Germany Became a Key Site for the Study of Jewish History | 171 viii Contents Stefanie Schüler-Springorum Non-Jewish Perspectives on German-Jewish History. A Generational Project? | 193 Matthias Morgenstern Rabbi S. R. Hirsch and his Perception of Germany and German Jewry | 207 Shulamit S. Magnus Between East and West: Pauline Wengeroff and her Cultural History of the Jews of Russia | 231 Shelly Zer-Zion The Anti-Nazi Plays of Habimah during the 1930s and the Making of Eretz-Israel Bildung | 247 Amir Eshel and Na’ama Rokem Berlin and Jerusalem: Toward German-Hebrew Studies | 265 Steven E. Aschheim and Vivian Liska Postscript | 273 Notes on Contributors | 277 Ofri Ilany The Jews as Educators of Humanity – a Christian-Philosemitic Grand Narrative of Jewish Modernity? In a famous passage in his memoir From Berlin to Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem portrays the assimilated character of his parents’ house. Scholem recalls how his father Arthur Scholem mocked the prohibition of smoking on the Sabbath and used the Sabbath candles to light a cigar. On the other hand, once or twice a year, the father “used to make a speech at the dinner table, praising the mission of the Jews. According to him, the mission was to proclaim to the world pure monothe- ism and a purely rational morality” (Scholem 1988, 11). In Scholem’s description, the ideal of the “Jewish mission” was almost the only trace of Judaism left in his father’s way of life. The renowned scholar, however, was far from enthusiastic about this ideal. Scholem cites this remark as an example of his father’s typical shallow, bourgeois notion of Judaism. Whether we accept Scholem’s judgment or not, this paragraph distinctively depicts the role of this ideal within the worldview of educated German Jews by the turn of the nineteenth century. The notion of the Jewish people’s universal mission is a most dominant theme in modern Jewish thought and culture from the time of the Haskalah, whose prevalence in the nineteenth and early twentieth century cannot be overestimated. The universal mission of the Jews is one of the grand narratives of modern Jewish culture. The view of Jewish existence as an enterprise aimed at benefiting humanity played an important role in the formation of various modern Jewish identities. As Leila Gürkan (2009) shows, the modern age saw a shift in the Jewish understand- ing of the notion of chosenness from “holiness” to “mission.” Whereas Orthodox Judaism could lean on traditional justifications for the Jews’ chosenness, other post-Enlightenment streams needed this discourse in order to prove their worthi- ness as Jews in the face of antisemitism and conversion and to secure their sym- bolic place within European culture. In this context, the formulation of Judaism as a universal project functioned as an important axis of identity. As argued by Richard Cohen (2008, 12), the discourse of the Jews’ contribution to civilization “significantly penetrated the sense of self of many Jews and sensitized others, consciously and subconsciously, to confront the question, time and again, of their sense of belonging to a particular society.” A collection of texts dedicated to this theme could form a rich anthology, as many of the major modern Jewish thinkers attempted to define the essence of Israel’s vocation. 2 Ofri Ilany Obviously, the “Jewish mission” is only a general conceptual framework whose actual components vary significantly among writers. One way to map this discourse is by distinguishing between conceptions of the religious role of Judaism in history on the one hand, and “secularized” visions of the Jewish peo- ple’s quest on the other. The first variation, focusing on the role of Judaism, is an essential element in the writings of major Jewish scholars and rabbis of different religious streams. Typically, Samson Raphael Hirsch argues that Israel’s mission is “to be the bearer of the Almighty’s teachings regarding God and man’s mission” and “to teach, by one’s destiny and way of life, that there is a higher goal than wealth and pleasure, science and culture” (Hirsch 1995, 198). Simultaneously, from the middle of the nineteenth century, socialist, liberal, nationalist and other intellectuals proposed many non-religious versions of the Jewish mission. In place of monotheism, these programs hail other features of Jewish existence and attribute universal significance to Jewish culture, the Jews as nation, and individual Jews. A few distinctive examples demonstrate the diversity of this discourse: Ludwig Philippson (1911), in his 1861 work The Industrial Mission of the Jews [Die industrielle Mission der Juden] argued that the Jew’s mission in history was to bring the economic ideas of the East, particularly banking, to “sluggish medieval Europe.” During World War I, Socialist leader Eduard Bernstein (1917) attributed the “universalist mission of world peace” to the Jews as the “born mediators between nations,” and psychoanalyst Otto Rank (1981) saw the role of the Jews in spreading “primitive sexuality” – an antidote to the growing sexual repression in European society. In this essay, I shall outline the genesis of the modern “Jewish mission” nar- rative. Actually, primitive theological views regarding the Jews’ role among the nations have a long tradition within Judaism ever since the biblical idea of or lagoyim (a light unto the nations), and later in Tannaic literature, in the notion of “Torah for the entire world” [Torah lekol baei olam] (Hirshman 1999).
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