Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity

Abstract

Hess, Jonathan M. Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 258pp. $40.00 hardcover. In a letter from 1964 that has come to be called Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue, Gershom Scholem disavows any mutually productive dialogue between Jews and Germans in the modern era. Scholem, in an essay published the next year, goes on to clarify that such a dialogue would have implied Jews participating in the debates of modernity not only as Germans, but also as Jews. Jonathan Hess' Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, attempts to address Scholem' s critique by making a case for the existence of an active and significant dialogue concerning Jewish emancipation between Jews and Judaism, on the one hand, and modern secular universalism, on the other, in the German states from the late 1770s until 1806. Hess poses the question: Why were Jews and Judaism of such enormous interest to the German public during this period? (4). answer, according to Hess, is that Jews seemed to offer up the perfect antithesis to the norms of the modern world, and as such could function as a kind of Enlightenment test case. The project of Jewish emancipation provided [...] the perfect arena for speculating about translating the lofty premises of Enlightenment universalism into concrete political practice (6). In this study, Hess wishes to recover the agency of the German-Jew within these eighteenth-century emancipation debates, claiming that Jews actively critiqued and indeed shaped contemporary efforts of assimilation. Even more important for Hess' argument is that German-Jews also offered critiques of Enlightenment universalism strategically drawn from their own normative tradition, fashioning and then advocating a specifically Jewish modernity. In the process of reconstructing the German-Jewish voice in the emancipation debate, Hess productively engages his project in many intertwined thematic fields such as secular anti-Semitism, Orientalism, and theology. Hess' constant self-reflexivity about the place of his project within those fields helps, but it is the playfulness of Hess' narrative style which ultimately carries the reader from such seemingly diverse topics as coffee-importation to that of the regeneration of the Jewish inhabitantof Prussia (Chapter 1). However, even Hess' rhetorical skill cannot change the fact that Jewish voices do not play a significant role in his first two chapters. Here, Hess lays out two dominant, non-Jewish stances in the emancipation debate: either the Jews are capable of being civically improved-Chapter 1 focuses on C. …