German Jewish Intellectuals Research Articles

A guide for the perplexed. Exploring the German-Jewish archives at the National Library of Israel

ABSTRACT The National Library of Israel holds more than 200 personal archives and collections of German-Jewish intellectuals from the 19 th and 20 th century. In 2021/2022, a joint project with the University of Hamburg catalogued and digitized 24 of the most important holdings. This article surveys the complex characteristics of the material and points to its significance for scholarship through three exemplary dimensions: personal entanglements, multilingualism, and migration histories. It also addresses the challenges of accessing and managing more than 700,000 digital images and shows the potentials they hold for future research. The article serves as an introduction to this special issue.

“The messiah waits for you!”: agency and Zionism in the German-Jewish reception of a Talmudic tale

ABSTRACT This article presents the unique reception of the Talmudic tale about the messiah at the gates of Rome (BT, Sanhedrin 98a) among German-Jewish intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Thereby, the article offers a new perspective on the relations between messianism, Zionism, and human agency in German-Jewish thought. In tractate Sanhedrin, Yehoshua ben Levi asks the messiah about the date of his arrival, and the redeemer answers, “Today.” However, as redemption fails to arrive, the prophet Elijah explains the redeemer’s words as “Today, if you will listen to my voice.” The tale raises the possibility that people have an agency to act and hasten the redemption. Nevertheless, the “correct” nature of redemptive actions is missing. I argue that by repeatedly interpreting the Aggadah, German-Jewish intellectuals position themselves within the political-theological conversation about Zionism and negotiate the tension between the ethical and the political manifestations of messianic agency. On the one hand, Zionists like Martin Buber, Chaim Arlosoroff, and Arnold Zweig change the content of the tale and charge it with political potency. On the other hand, Franz Rosenzweig returns to the traditional tale to offer a counter-reading supporting an ethical mode of agency instead of a Zionist form of activity.

Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema by Leila Mukhida

Reviewed by: Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema by Leila Mukhida Simone Pfleger Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema. By Leila Mukhida. New York: Berghahn Books, 2020. Pp. 218. Paper $120.00. ISBN 978-1-78920-630-2. In Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema, Leila Mukhida engages with theory by German Jewish intellectuals Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Alexander Kluge, emphasizing "points of intersection and divergence in their writing, points that emerge from their shared disenchantment with the domestic output of the German film industry" (8) in order to examine the political aesthetics of postunification German and Austrian cinema. The book foregrounds the importance of medium-specific devices like lighting, [End Page 394] sound, and mise-en-scène for close readings of contemporary film. In dialogue with a number of works by these neo-Marxist thinkers, who have interrogated notions of precarity, temporality, and contingency, Mukhida argues that post-1989 films by directors such as Valeska Grisebach, Michael Haneke, Andreas Dresen, and Elke Hauck engender a political sensitivity in viewers. Mukhida insists that the political aesthetic of contemporary German-language cinema, when read through the writings of Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kluge, allows for a unique understanding of contemporary films that departs from Eric Rentschler's analysis of German post-Wall cinema as one of consensus. While Rentschler suggests that the political value of contemporary films becomes legible when compared to the aesthetic and stylistic choices and production strategies of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 70s, Mukhida's readings seek to undo the dichotomy between "consensus" and "interference." After a brief introduction to set the stage for the project, chapter 1 foregrounds filmic content, or plot, and context as opposed to form. Mukhida interrogates representations of the working class and asks whether such a category is applicable to twenty-first-century German and Austrian films. Emphasizing that films such as Toni Erdmann (2016) by Maren Ade and Western (2017) by Valeska Grisebach visualize changes to the flow of capital and labor, they insist that films such as Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death (2004) and Elke Hauck's Karger (2007) "do not allow viewers to choose to remain ignorant of the human cost in the current global economic system" (63) and foreground the precarious conditions of workers. Leaning on Kracauer's understanding of film as "uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality" (Kracauer in Mukhida 68) in chapter 2, Mukhida turns their sights to the possibilities of representation. They offer readings of Angela Schanelec's Marseille (2004), Gerhard Friedl's Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelikte begangen? (2004), and Andreas Dresen's Halt auf freier Strecke (2011), films that pay close attention to the "real." Mukhida foregrounds how the three films "disrupt the viewing experience, yet at the same time there is a commitment to authenticity" (102). Thus, they understand the films discussed in this chapter as linked to documentary-style filmmaking. Chapter 3 argues that Benjamin, Kracauer, and Kluge encourage active viewer participation instead of the passive consumption of the films' storylines. Indeed, the theorists "demand a transformation from a passive viewer . . . to an active collaborator"(107). Analyzing Michael Haneke's 71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (1994) and Code Inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (2000), Mukhida claims that the filmmaker seeks to "challenge viewers' imagination rather than to numb them" (108), but these films still exhibit a sense of optimism that is tied to the filmmaker's impetus to engage his audience. The fourth chapter turns to the notion of alienation and argues that Benjamin's theory of the shock effect functions as a means to generate alertness and critical awareness in the audience. Viewers' heightened awareness of their life worlds enables [End Page 395] them to become more sensitive and develop a sense of ethical responsibility. Both Ulrich Seidl's Hundstage (2001) and Valeska Grisebach's Sehnsucht (2006) generate feelings of discomfort and withhold the possibility for viewers to make sense of the images on-screen (such as the portrayal of accidents and suicide attempts). Mostly summarizing the main arguments of the book's four chapters...

Jewish Nietzscheanism

Abstract Jewish Nietzscheans have traditionally shied away from any detailed examination of Nietzsche’s comments on contemporary Jewry or the Jewish religion. Scholars who have examined Jewish Nietzscheans have therefore sought to connect Nietzsche with some dimension of Jewish thought through similarities in views between Nietzsche and the Jewish intellectuals who were purportedly influenced by him. The two books under consideration in this essay strain to find solid connections between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the writings of eminent Jewish writers. Daniel Rynhold and Michael Harris examine how selected Nietzschean concepts can also be found in the work of the noted Jewish thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. David Ohana, by contrast, examines a variety of Jewish writers who at some point exhibited an enthusiasm for Nietzsche, ranging from Hebrew scholars and translators to German-Jewish intellectuals. Both books suffer from many of the shortcomings of general Nietzschean influence studies: there is often no sound philological evidence of influence, or the “connection” is so general that it is difficult to see Nietzsche as the source of influence, or the alleged influence was of short duration, and it is difficult to understand what remains Nietzschean in the individual influenced.

Jewish Nietzscheanism

Abstract Jewish Nietzscheans have traditionally shied away from any detailed examination of Nietzsche’s comments on contemporary Jewry or the Jewish religion. Scholars who have examined Jewish Nietzscheans have therefore sought to connect Nietzsche with some dimension of Jewish thought through similarities in views between Nietzsche and the Jewish intellectuals who were purportedly influenced by him. The two books under consideration in this essay strain to find solid connections between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the writings of eminent Jewish writers. Daniel Rynhold and Michael Harris examine how selected Nietzschean concepts can also be found in the work of the noted Jewish thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. David Ohana, by contrast, examines a variety of Jewish writers who at some point exhibited an enthusiasm for Nietzsche, ranging from Hebrew scholars and translators to German-Jewish intellectuals. Both books suffer from many of the shortcomings of general Nietzschean influence studies: there is often no sound philological evidence of influence, or the “connection” is so general that it is difficult to see Nietzsche as the source of influence, or the alleged influence was of short duration, and it is difficult to understand what remains Nietzschean in the individual influenced.

Shifting the Borders of Culture and Identity: German-Jewish Intellectuals as Cultural Mediators between Germany and France

Shifting the Borders of Culture and Identity: German-Jewish Intellectuals as Cultural Mediators between Germany and France

Fashioning the “Mother of Israel”: The Ottoman Jewish Historical Narrative and the Image of Jewish Salonica

Using sources in Judeo-Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew, this article explores the complex processes through which Ottoman Jewish intellectuals fashioned their own vision of Ottoman Jewish history, positioned Salonica at the center of that narrative, and in the process popularized an image of the city as the “mother of Israel.” Ottoman Jewish history writers internalized Enlightenment discourses about “regeneration,” “civilization,” and “modernity” that also shaped the nineteenth-century historiography of Greek Christian, Ottoman Muslim, French Jewish, and German Jewish intellectuals. This article focuses on how Ottoman Jewish intellectuals translated French Jewish and German Jewish historical narratives about Ottoman Jewry into Judeo-Spanish, adapted and rewrote them, and ultimately overturned them. Discovering that German Jewish historians portrayed Ottoman Jews as being in decline while French Jewish writers adopted a more sympathetic perspective, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recast their own former narrative of tragedy as an exceptional story of Jewish redemption and romance in the Ottoman realm. In reclaiming Ottoman Jewish history they sought to strengthen their position within the Ottoman Empire and to elevate their status in the eyes of world Jewry. The Salonican Jewish intellectuals who participated in this effort presented an image of their city and its storied Jewish past as an idealized symbol of the broader Ottoman Jewish experience and founded a Salonican Jewish historiography that still shapes our understanding of the city’s history today.

Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

The Advantages of Diversity

In college, I was surprised by the excitement of those in the student union who were hovering over the headlines in the local newspaper: “Russia Launches the First Satellite …‘Sputnik.’” Russia had won the “race to space.” How could Russia, where the majority of the population had only learned to read and write in the last fifty years, outdo the United States? Here’s how: in 1945 the Allies allocated Berlin to Russia. Russia seized German scientists and Jewish intellectuals in countries from the Baltic to the Adriatic, thus acquiring a new talent pool of the brightest minds in Europe. Its edge over the United States in the “space race” succeeded because of a diverse talent pool of harnessed diversity. This caused US leaders to evaluate their own scientists. The United States realized that the only way to win the “space race” was to expand the educational system to include all races and cultures.

The German Archive of the Hebrew Habima: Bureaucracy and Identity

AbstractThe administrative archive of Habima, nowadays Israel’s national theater, resides at the Israeli center for the documentation of the performing arts at Tel Aviv University. The majority of the documents, which date from the 1920s and early 1930s, were written in German, and involve prominent German Jewish businessmen and intellectuals. This archival corpus is surprising, because the profile of Habima is generally associated with the Eastern European- Soviet theatrical heritage and with the revival of Hebrew. This article seeks to present the nature of this collection and to reevaluate its contribution to the study of German Jewry as well as to the history of Hebrew theatre.

“Rather More than One-Third Had No Jewish Blood”: American Progressivism and German-Jewish Cosmopolitanism at the New School for Social Research, 1933–1939

The New School for Social Research’s University in Exile accepted more German and European exiled intellectuals than any other American institution of higher education. This paper argues that transnational, cosmopolitan ideological and interest-based affinities shared by left-leaning American progressives and German-Jewish intellectuals enabled the predominantly Jewish University in Exile to become a vibrant intellectual space accepted by the community of largely anti-Semitic American academics. These affinities also illuminate why, despite the fact that the emigres’ exile was in large part the result of National Socialist hatred of Jews, Alvin Johnson (the founder of the University in Exile) and the faculty members that comprised it seldom discussed the University’s Jewish demographics. The Jewish faculty members ignored the relationship between their ethnicity and exile because to focus on it would have been to admit that the cosmopolitan project they had embraced in Central Europe had failed. Johnson ignored the faculty’s Jewish heritage for two reasons. First, he endorsed a cosmopolitan American nationalism. Second, he understood that the generally anti-Semitic community of American academics would have rejected the University in Exile if he stressed the faculty’s Jewishness. In ignoring the University in Exile’s Jewish demographics, Johnson and the University’s faculty successfully adhered to a strategy designed to foster the exiles’ entrance into the American intellectual community. Thus, while cosmopolitanism failed in Germany and Central Europe, the exiles’ later influence on the American academy indicates that it partially succeeded in the United States.

On Getting It Right

On Getting It Right Vivian Liska (bio) Moshe Idel. Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 336. The importance of Moshe Idel’s Old Worlds, New Mirrors can hardly be overstated. It is both a seminal and daunting intervention in the field of modern European Jewish thought that takes to task its towering figures: mainly German Jewish modernists from Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin, and Buber to Steiner, Celan, and Derrida, with occasional references to Freud, Arendt, Adorno, Jonas, Leo Strauss, and others. The book also questions the cult that developed around these figures, suggesting that it led to a disproportionate attention to a “quantitatively tiny elite culture” (p. 70) at the expense of the actual wealth of Jewish thought and writing. Idel’s critique of the ways these celebrated European Jewish figures and their followers approach Judaism and integrate elements of the kabbalistic tradition in their thinking is pertinent and profound. It is also unsettling, disconcerting, and even shocking at times. Idel’s intervention in this field is more important than he himself concedes in his misleadingly mild introduction where he defines the objective of his book in a dry scholarly manner as “adding the Eastern European perspective to the Central European one,” an approach, he states, that “would yield a more complex and informative description” of the field (p. 12). Idel believes that this added perspective can correct “misunderstandings of the mystical texts under scrutiny” (p. 12). If these two assertions—complementing and correcting existing scholarship—covered the scope of the book, it would be little more than another scholarly revision. The book’s importance, however, lies neither with being a more complete description nor a rectification of modern understandings of Jewish mystical texts. Of course this is a key part of the book: an eminent expert sets [End Page 297] things right and chides those who have torn kabbalistic elements out of their rich and variegated context at the price of the distortion and reduction of their original meaning. The title points to this aspect of the book: the Old are worlds, alive and manifold; the New are mirrors—a treacherous medium of representation in which the Old is reflected as a mere illusion. But the book’s scope reaches far beyond this delimitation and also beyond another assertion at the end of its introduction where Idel claims that his effort “should not be seen as a critique of the Central European [translate: essentially German Jewish] approaches to Judaism but as an interrogation of the two perspectives, the Eastern and Western one, a questioning that may serve as a corrective to each” (p. 12). It is, however, noteworthy that the shortcomings of the Eastern perspective—described by Idel essentially as a “lack of critical approach” (p. 12)—are barely addressed. Instead, the book offers an extended critique of the Western perspective from an Eastern one that is implicitly considered more authentic. Idel’s critique of the group of mainly German Jewish intellectuals mentioned above and of their impact on a widely accepted vision of Judaism in contemporary thought is his real work in this collection of essays. As a challenge to current approaches and practices in the field of German Jewish studies, it is monumental, both in what I consider to be the book’s most important and its most problematic claims. In what follows I will sketch two examples for each of these assessments, the remarkable and the dubious, taken mostly from the chapter on George Steiner. In the first two cases, these examples will illustrate Idel’s powerful and convincing critique of the modern understanding of the “Jewish spirit” and of a liberal and cosmopolitan metaphorization of Jewish existence. In the last two examples, I question critically Idel’s perspective on the relation between the Holocaust and Israel as well as his understanding of the German Jewish legacy as a whole. What Idel in his introduction somewhat harmlessly calls “adding the Eastern European perspective” (p. 12) to the Central European one—something he considers part of a scholarly, pluralistic, and nonessentializing approach—is actually a radical critique of what Derrida calls...

On Some Motifs in Moyshe-Leyb Halpern: A Benjaminian Meditation on Yiddish Modernism

Walter Benjamin’s writings on Charles Baudelaire offer one of the most influential accounts of the challenges facing the poet of modern urban experience. Had he known the work of the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Benjamin would have discovered striking parallels to the motifs and attitudes he traced in Baudelaire, including the emphasis on the crowd, the figure of the flâneur, and the deflation of the role of lyric poet. By reading Halpern’s urban poetics alongside Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire, we can bring Halpern’s modernism out of the exclusively Yiddish context in which it is generally read. Such a reading also helps us identify the unique resources available to the poet writing in Yiddish, resources that Halpern drew upon to project a different vision of the individual’s fate in the modern city than the one Benjamin finds in Baudelaire. Through a close reading of Halpern’s poems about the New York subway, it is possible to see how the Yiddish language summons memories of the landscape of East European Jewish life, providing an alternate frame of reference and a partial imaginative refuge for the Jew in the modern city. Halpern’s representation of the modern city is thus palimpsestic (bearing traces of earlier times and places), whereas Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s urban poetry as allegorical, pointing to a world of experience that has been irretrievably lost. Benjamin’s meditations on Jewishness were largely restricted to matters of theology, but Halpern’s poetry provides a model for a specifically Jewish modernist literature. By recovering Halpern’s Jewish modernism, we can correct for the blindness about Yiddish culture that characterized Weimar-era German Jewish intellectuals such as Benjamin.

Disturbing Proximity

Disturbing Proximity William H. F. Altman John J. Ranieri. Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 272. Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 254. John J. Ranieri. Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. Pp. ix + 272. Benjamin Lazier. God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv + 254. It is certainly not the thematic proximity of these two well-researched and thought-provoking books that disturbs: they complement each other in many useful ways, creating in the process a whole greater than its parts.1 One aspect of this overlap is methodological: Lazier is an intellectual historian while Ranieri's field is philosophy. But the more important factor is that while both books are in large measure devoted to Leo Strauss, Ranieri never mentions either Hans Jonas or Gershom Scholem—the other two members of Lazier's triad of interwar German Jewish intellectuals—while Lazier never discusses Eric Voegelin, with whom Ranieri links Strauss.2 Given the primary importance of Gnosticism in Lazier's book—along with Pantheism it is one of two modern heresies under consideration there3—his decision not to consider Voegelin becomes less jarring in the context of Ranieri. In the meantime, Ranieri's [End Page 292] failure to discuss key figures like Jonas, Scholem, and Karl Barth makes Lazier an indispensable historical corrective along the way. It is rather the pervasive proximity of an uninvited guest to this rich intellectual banquet that is disturbing. As long as anti-Semitism is considered an adventitious or merely expedient element of National Socialism, itself understood as little more than collective stupidity,4 it can, of course, be safely excluded from serious discussion both of contemporaneous thinkers who regarded Old Testament Revelation as "disturbing" and interwar German heresies whereby God was "interrupted." But if, as Strauss famously claimed, National Socialism "had no other clear principle except murderous hatred of the Jews,"5 it must be considered in an intellectual context as well as a Jewish one. Strauss's friend Jacob Klein pointed in this direction when he called National Socialism "Judaism without God."6 It turns out that there is a disturbing proximity between Klein's astute analysis of National Socialism and the four German-born thinkers considered in these two books.7 The only serious flaw in Ranieri's treatment of Strauss is his claim that "the Second Cave" is an attempt to outflank Christianity but not Judaism (pp. 23–24).8 But Ranieri is miles ahead of Strauss's apologists who read the Second Cave as a critique of historicism rather than Revelation.9 [End Page 293] Despite his repeated and perfectly appropriate insistence on the illegitimacy of Strauss's "silence with regard to the New Testament" (p. 173, also 11–13), Ranieri overlooks the anti-Jewish implications of Strauss's post-Platonic image of the recovery of "natural ignorance" (p. 24)10 through a Nietzsche-inspired (p. 24)11 emancipation from the tradition of Revelation.12 It is interesting to ponder exactly why an anti-Christian Strauss should be so much more palatable than an anti-Jewish version.13 But for someone who once accepted14—and never subsequently repudiated—the truth of Nietzsche's claims about the Jewish origins of Christianity,15 Strauss's obvious anti-Christianity doesn't ipso facto disprove the hypothesis of his covert anti-Judaism. The most important contribution Ranieri makes to the understanding of Strauss is likewise connected to this Christian orientation. Ranieri's readings of "Jerusalem and Athens," "Progress or Return?," and "On the Interpretation of Genesis" (pp. 115–24) are competent and often insightful, but his treatment of On Tyranny (and related documents)16 is magisterial. Ranieri begins by revealing that charity is the unlikely villain in Strauss's intellectual universe.17 By replacing the self-affirming and autonomous "admiration" of the classics with an other-dependent "love,"18 "the triumph of the biblical orientation"19 undermines all that is [End Page...

Zwischen ,Wissenschaft des Judentums' und politischem Messianismus Saint-Simonismus und deutsche Reformbewegung

AbstractThe relationship between the religious political group of the Saint-Simonians and the German movement for political reform around 1830 has already been amply investigated. Significantly less explored is the Jewish aspect of this connection. The article focuses on the significance of the participation of the Jewish members of the Saint-Simonian movement and the cultural transfer initiated by them with German Jewish intellectuals and political activists such as Gabriel Riesser.

Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad Y. Michal Bodemann Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad, by Steven E. Aschheim. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007. 208 pp. $27.95. Steven Aschheim begins his study on German Jewish intellectuals with Hannah Arendt’s observation that the German-speaking Jews were an “altogether unique phenomenon” which calls for urgent investigation. In this richly erudite book with its nearly 500 footnotes, Aschheim has contributed to just that imperative, and while much has been written on the Weimar German Jewish intellectuals, Aschheim has approached his subject in a manner which other studies could not attempt to do. In the first of his three essays, he addresses the role of German-Jewish intellectuals in Palestine, from Martin Buber to Arthur Ruppin, and their brand of bi-nationally oriented humanist Zionism; in the second, he deals with the role of the émigré historians, mostly in the U.S. (which might explain why Eric Hobsbawm, for example, was excluded) and their role in shaping a new brand of cultural history, and in the last chapter, he asks what might have made these intellectuals (Benjamin, Arendt, Scholem, Adorno, and others) so influential and “fascinating” to younger generations of Western intellectuals today. All three of Aschheim’s intellectual incursions, then, address the rich cultural and intellectual environment we associate with the Weimar Republic, itself the culmination of developments from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Jewish emancipation, democratic patriotism of 1848, and the socialist movement later on. The formation of these German-Jewish intellectuals, their habitus and world views, cannot be explained outside this legacy. And as Jews, they did not even have the chance to become enamored of Weimar’s other strains—antisemitism and völkisch nationalism. Despite their humanist formation, then, Aschheim seems to flirt with the idea, amply contradicted by his own evidence and arguments, that the figures around the Brith Shalom in Palestine were inspired not by German/European liberalism and humanism, but by the negative experiences of European barbarities in World War I and experiences of ethno-nationalism throughout Europe. No doubt the harrowing experiences of the Great War were a catalytic element, but as the author himself points out, there were indeed workable models of ethno-national co-existence in Europe, from Switzerland and Belgium to the Danish minority in Schleswig and most of all, perhaps, Austro-Hungary with the multi-ethnic communities of Prague or Czernowitz. Austro-Marxism provided a model there, as well as the universalistic message [End Page 185] of socialism that influenced many in Brith Shalom and German-Jewish intellectuals (Benjamin, Adorno) elsewhere. These German-Jewish notions are quite distinct, then, from Jabotinsky and his East European followers, and a debate such as Lenin’s discussion of the “Bund in the Party” would have been inconceivable in the West. Moreover, the different assimilationist and universalist habitus of Western Jewry was markedly different from that of their Jewish brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. Amos Oz’s novels have portrayed that intellectual chasm very powerfully. The “crises of conscience” incurred by members of Brith Shalom in the wake of later developments in Palestine, which made a bi-national solution impossible, are hardly reconcilable with notions of Realpolitik that might have grown out of the negative experiences in Europe per se. In light of recent debates concerning a binational solution in Israel/Palestine, Aschheim makes clear that the ideas of Brith Shalom have not lost any of their power and logic. In the second part, Aschheim shows how a small number of émigré historians have created a quite original form of German cultural history, and he contrasts that to the parallel development of a politically committed social history as it developed in West Germany around the same time, from the 1960’s onwards. The émigré cultural historians, a handful including George Mosse, Peter Gay and Fritz Stern, made it their life’s work to address the question of how Nazism became possible within the cultural traditions of Germany, and they were in a position to examine that subject unencumbered by the contemporary German context and its political discourses of guilt and denial, and without the dubious advantage...

Eugene R. Sheppard.Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher.:Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher.(The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.)

Eugene R. Sheppard's study examines Leo Strauss, the Jew, the German, the Zionist, the critic of liberalism, and above all the philosopher. The Strauss that emerges from this meticulous study is a fervent conservative and an eclectic voice. Simultaneously shaped by the multiplicity of biographical, historical, and philosophical contexts, Strauss bridged some of the most extreme Weimar philosophical traditions in his own work. Born into rural Hesse in the small town of Kirchhain, raised in a middle-class Jewish family, Strauss grew up within a Jewish community of religious observance and patriotism, a conservative region in which political antisemitism found receptive listeners. Recalling his childhood in a Zionist article, Strauss believed that the rural Hessen communities had “remained virtually untouched by the liberal Reform movement” (p. 10) in the nineteenth century. For him, his place of origin informed his philosophical and political views. Kirchhain also placed him in geographical proximity to the neo-Kantian and Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, whose philosophical work continued to emanate from Marburg even after his retirement in 1912. Strauss shared with many other German Jewish intellectuals of the period a great admiration for the Jewish neo-Kantian “because he was a passionate philosopher and a Jew devoted to Judaism” (p. 14).

The Satyr as Prophet: Notes on the “Jewish” Michelangelo

AbstractFocusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essay argues that there existed a Jewish fascination with the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti that was representative not only of a larger German and Jewish Italophilia at the time but also indicative of Jewish aesthetic concerns. Lodged between popular culture and the intellectual quest for an aesthetics that would problematize the figurative image and the classical sense of the beautiful, the Jewish reception of Michelangelo was guided by the themes of terribilita, unfinishedness, and the destruction of form. What emerges is a consistent dialectic of image and anti-image particularly in the writings of Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ernst Bloch. But what also emerges is that German Jewish intellectuals entertained a great, though often ambivalent, admiration for the Italian Renaissance and the culture of modern Italy.

German Jewish Intellectuals' Diaspora in Turkey: 1933–551

The anti‐Semitism of Nazi Germany prompted Jewish people to seek refuge in numerous places. Among the least known was Turkey, which welcomed highly educated emigres in the hopes of transforming Tur...

Building a Zion in German(y): Franz Rosenzweig on Yehudah Halevi

Among the diverse positions on the question of Zionism held by early-twentieth-century German Jewish intellectuals is the eccentric "non-Zionist" stance of Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). In a translation and commentary called Sixty Hymns and Poems of Yehudah Halevi (1924; 2nd ed. 1927), Rosenzweig aimed to contribute to and shift the discourse concerning Jewish distinctiveness and belonging in German culture. Critical in this effort was Rosenzweig's attention to the scriptural and liturgical elements of Yehudah Halevi's poetry, which he argued were emblematic of Jewish literary and textual culture. The structure, poetic choices, and commentary of Hymns and Poems, a volume long overlooked in Rosenzweig's oeuvre, is properly understood as a sustained meditation on Jewish diasporic life and the role of textuality in preserving it.