Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire by Malachi Haim Hacohen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire by Malachi Haim Hacohen Michael Brenner Malachi Haim Hacohen. Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 752 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000306 This book is special in many ways, not the least of it being that readers get two books for the price of one. The first book is a learned and detailed longue-durée historical exegesis of the Jacob and Esau story. The second book is, on its surface, an outline of the relationship between nation and empire in modern Europe, but more concretely a modern reading of Jewish existence in the Habsburg Empire and twentieth-century Austria. To be sure, both themes overlap at times, but often they take their own course, and might have better fit between two different book covers. Let us begin with the first thread of his complex narrative. It is a quite original reading of the Jacob and Esau story from Roman times until the twenty-first century. Hacohen argues "that the Roman Empire and not Christianity was crucial to rabbinic Edom" and "that European Christendom's formation in confrontation with Islam first fixed the Jewish gaze on the Roman Empire's religious character [End Page 448] and triggered the Christianization of Edom and Esau" (79). In this equation of Esau (a.k.a. Edom) with the notion of empire we see the connection between the two threads of the book. Hacohen continues to weave this intricate net for most of his medieval topics. Esau, he argues, "became Christian when Jews recognized, belatedly, that what they dismissed as another minut became the driving force of empire" (92). As we proceed to the later periods, this intriguing connection between the Esau and Jacob story on the one hand and the nation/empire narrative is not always present. When Hacohen discusses modern Jacob and Esau interpretations, his account is based mainly on rabbinic sermons of a very broad spectrum: the traditionalist Ḥatam Sofer likening Esau with Reform Jews and placing them outside the community; the Hamburg Reform preacher Eduard Kley using Jacob to promote "a Jewish-inflected liberal Protestantism as authentic Judaism"; the Vienna preacher Isaac Noah Mannheimer calling on German Jews to acculturate before being granted emancipation; the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy Samson Raphael Hirsch turning Jacob's struggle with the angel into the saga of Jewish exile and emancipation. Hacohen's sympathies clearly lie with the more traditional rabbis and their efforts to preserve tradition within modernity, as opposed to Reform rabbis who, like Hamburg preacher Eduard Kley, were offering, in Hacohen's words, "a Jewishinflected liberal Protestantism as authentic Judaism, and preaching misogyny and intolerance under the guise of enlightened liberalism" (232). These chapters of the book may not be tied strongly into the discourse on nation and empire, but they are the real core of the book, a true treasure for historians. Hacohen uses original material to read modern Jewish history against the grain. It is not the usual intellectuals or the political spokespeople of nineteenth-century central European Jewry he is interested in, but rather their often-overlooked religious leaders. By analyzing their sermons through the perspective of Jacob and Esau, Hacohen delivers an innovative view of modern German and Austrian Jewish history. This alone would be sufficient reason to read the book. But then there is still the other book. Much of its second half provides an account of Austrian Jewish intellectuals in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century. We read about Jewish imperial politics and socialist federalism; Adolf Fischhof's and Nathan Birnbaum's Diaspora politics; Karl Popper's Open Society; Red Vienna of the 1920s; concepts of Jewish cosmopolitanism; Erich Auerbach and concepts of Judeo-Christian Europe; and, in the final chapter, about postwar remigrés to Austria, such as the writer Friedrich Torberg, a brilliant intellectual and a Cold War warrior. It is not always clear what all this material, plus much more, has to do with the Jacob and Esau narrative, but we find here undoubtedly the most interesting account to date on modern intellectual Austrian Jewish history, which makes the book worth...