Ethics of Interpretation: Cultures of Jewish Memory in Romanticism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Romantic memory and hermeneutics may be fruitfully studied alongside conceptualizations of the Haskalah, the account of European Judaism’s embrace of Enlightenment ideals of reason in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which some scholars now see less as a development of the Enlightenment than an engagement of European Romanticism. Jewish literature and philosophy that fall under the aegis of the Haskalah define the claims of Jewish inheritance against its very history. This article argues that the discontinuity with history implied by correction, or progress, is often represented as healed in the fiction that such discontinuity is a discovery of the genuine authenticity of the past. Cultural and religious continuity, then, is a function of interpretation. This article argues further that the study of collective memory calls for interpretive paradigms that themselves depend on conceptualizations of memory. Entering Jewish culture into these circular paradigms—here through the writings of Solomon Maimon, Hyman Hurwitz, and Marion and Celia Moss—both complicates and clarifies them. Jewish memory depends crucially upon interpretation, and takes account of the ethics of interpretation. These authors represent themselves as having propelled themselves into an enlightened present which all the same stands for the authentic meaning of Jewish collective memory.