For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.
For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.
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For generations of German-speaking Jews, the works of Goethe and Schiller epitomized the world of European high culture, a realm that Jews actively participated in as both readers and consumers. Yet from the 1830s on, Jews writing in German also produced a vast corpus of popular fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content, audience, and function. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity offers the first comprehensive investigation in English of this literature, which sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. This study examines the ways in which popular fiction assumed an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. It locates in nineteenth-century Germany a defining moment of the modern Jewish experience and the beginnings of a tradition of Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804774239 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/12/2010 |
| Series: | Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity
By Jonathan M. Hess
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6122-2
Chapter One
Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition: The Sephardic Legacy and the Making of Middlebrow Classics
Tales from the Lending Library: Popular Literature and the Origin of Jewish Belles Lettres
In July 1907, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums published an article commemorating the centennial of the birth of Phöbus Philippson (1807-1870), a country doctor in a small town in the Altmark who was also the older brother of the paper's founding editor, Rabbi Ludwig Philippson (1811-1889). During his lifetime, Phöbus Philippson was a published authority on cholera and the editor of medical journals. What interested the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1907, however, were less the provincial doctor's medical accomplishments than his pioneering contributions to literary life, his inauguration of a tradition of Jewish historical fiction:
Phöbus, who was very gifted as a writer of novellas, recognized that depictions of the rich history of Israel in novella form could be an effective means of deepening religious feeling and could be particularly gripping for young people.... The first work of Phöbus Philippson, Die Marannen [The Marranos], a tale about Spanish history at the time of the eviction of the Jews in 1492, appeared in the newly founded Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837. Today, when the book market produces title after title in rapid succession, it is hard to imagine how Philippson's supremely inspired tale set young people on fire and inspired the older generation. Indeed, Ludwig could not get his brother to send him installments quickly enough, and he received numerous letters from members of the public impatiently demanding the next installments. When Saron, Ludwig Philippson's extensive collection of Jewish novellas, appeared in 1843, it opened with Die Marannen, which met with universal approval and was translated into many languages, including Hebrew.
The genius of the Philippson brothers' collaboration, we read here, was that it yielded powerful and gripping historical fiction, Jewish pageturners that strengthened the religious feelings of their readers while instilling in them a constant and growing desire for more such literature. In his obituary for Phöbus in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1870, Ludwig Philippson similarly praised the "extraordinary success" of Die Marannen, proudly describing his brother's novella as "an entirely new and momentous phenomenon" that marked nothing less than "the beginning of the entirety of modern Jewish belles lettres."
Die Marannen, of course, is hardly the only text that literary historians have enshrined as the inaugural piece of modern Jewish fiction. Even scholars of German-Jewish literature routinely point out that the same year that witnessed the serialization of Philippson's novella in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums also saw the publication of Berthold Auerbach's novel Spinoza, and Heinrich Heine's novel fragment "Der Rabbi von Bacherach" (The Rabbi of Bacherach), which was published in 1840, was written much earlier, in the 1820s. But unlike Auerbach and Heine, who went on to write literature largely on non-Jewish themes that was read and admired by the general public, the Philippson brothers continued cultivating fiction by Jews about Jews for a primarily Jewish readership. In this sense, Philippson's novella does demarcate an important starting point. Die Marannen itself appeared in print eight times between 1837 and 1870; it was published in book form in Yiddish and Russian in the late nineteenth century; and it appeared in two different English translations and three different Hebrew translations, one of which even rendered it into verse. The following decades witnessed the production of scores of further Jewish historical novels and novellas. In keeping with Philippson's insistence that his brother's 1837 novella represented a pivotal point of departure, moreover, the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 proved a seemingly unending source of fascination for German-Jewish readers. From the German adaptation of Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars (1850) that Ludwig Philippson distributed through the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Israelite Literature) in 1860 to Philippson's own novel Jakob Tirado (1867) and Marcus Lehmann's modern orthodox classic Die Familie Y Aguillar (The Family Y Aguillar, 1873), novels and novellas about the Iberian Jewish experience became a fixture in German-Jewish literary life. This phenomenon persisted well into the twentieth century through works such as Hermann Sinsheimer's Maria Nunnez (1934) and Lion Feuchtwanger's Die Jüdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo, 1955).
As Ismar Schorsch argued in a seminal article two decades ago, the German-Jewish fascination with Spain formed part of a "Sephardic mystique" that was ubiquitous in liturgy, synagogue architecture, scholarship, and belles lettres in the nineteenth century. Fascinated by the immense cultural and scholarly productivity in the centuries before 1492, and particularly in the period when Spain was largely under Islamic rule, Jews in the nineteenth-century German-speaking world often fashioned Golden Age Spain as a "usable past," styling the experience of Sephardic Jewry as a model of "cultural openness, philosophic thinking, and an appreciation for the aesthetic" worthy of being imitated in the present. Whether focusing on the poets Jehuda Halevi or Abraham Ibn-Esra, the philosopher Moses Maimonides, the traveler Benjamin of Tudela, or the biblical critic and statesman Isaac Abarbanel, German Jews often found in the glories of the Iberian Jewish past a presciently modern model of cultural integration, an attractive alternative to both the experience of suffering and persecution in medieval Germany and contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe. And as Florian Krobb has argued, the fact that the Spanish experiment came to end so tragically only reinforced its pull on the German-Jewish imagination. For Jews seeking to maintain multiple identities as Germans, Jews, and members of the bourgeoisie, the experience of those Iberian Jews who underwent baptism but continued to practice Judaism in secret provided a particularly productive foil for reflecting on assimilation and its limits.
For the Anglo-Jewish novelist Grace Aguilar, who came herself from a Sephardic family, the dual life of the conversos in Spain could serve indirectly as a model for Jews eager to transform Judaism into a domestic religion that would be tolerated but hidden from view. German-Jewish writers had for the most part no genealogical link to the Sephardic past. Unlike Aguilar's Vale of Cedars, their works typically emphasized the disgrace and despair of Marrano life, characterizing it as the antithesis of a modern world in which Jews could effectively balance multiple allegiances. Many recent historians and literary critics have stressed the precociously modern and even postmodern hybridity of the Marrano experience, the ways crypto-Jews created radically new identities for themselves that were neither Jewish nor Catholic but often cast both religious traditions into question. Writers like Lehmann and Philippson who were eager to create a vibrant German-Jewish literary culture, however, had little sympathy with such ambivalence. Lehmann, for instance, opened an 1868 novella about crypto-Jews in Madrid by stressing the hypocrisy of converso life: "Marranos! The misery that this word encompasses is indescribable. Marranos were those Spanish Jews who had been too weak in the fifteenth century to sacrifice fatherland, fortune and the sweet habits of homeland to their faith." Ludwig Philippson has the virtuous female heroine in Jakob Tirado, the legendary seventeenth-century historical figure Marie Nunes, express similar sentiments. Marie Nunes, who eventually escapes from Portugal and helps found the modern Jewish community in Amsterdam, complains frequently about the hypocrisy of her converso ancestors whose legacy is an "ill-fated inner conflict that has been torturing us for so many years and that embitters every hour of peace."
It was in this sense that the experience of Iberian Jewry could be made to speak directly to the German-Jewish present, celebrating the nineteenth century as that era where such ill-fated conflicts awaited their final resolution. Philippson's Marannen, for instance, which despite its title deals primarily with Jews who fled Spain in 1492 rather than with actual conversos, concludes in the early sixteenth century by rewriting the history of Ferdinand and Isabella's financier Isaac Abarbanel. The historical Abarbanel escaped from Spain in 1492 to end up in Venice, where he continued to serve as a protector of his fellow Jews and complete an influential corpus of biblical criticism, becoming one of the leading Jewish scholars of his day. As Philippson noted in an essay he published in 1834 on the history of the expulsions from Iberia, when Abarbanel died, in 1508, he was mourned by Jews and the Venetian elite alike, survived by three sons and many grandchildren. In Die Marannen three years later, Philippson gave the life story of Abarbanel a different sort of closure, staging a reunion between him, his only son, and an entirely fictional adoptive, German-born daughter, Dinah, on the island of Corfu. Abarbanel ends here, without the prospect of having further descendants. The final link in an illustrious family that traces its genealogy back to King David, he is doomed to a life of dual exile: "The exiled Marrano gazed toward the East and toward the West, driven out both there and here, in one direction looking toward the ruins of his Temple on the soil of Palestine, in the other toward the ruins of his domestic happiness in the valleys of Iberia." For readers of this novella in the nineteenth-century German world, this melancholy conclusion was not without hope. The dual exile of Philippson's refugees obviously pointed toward a new homeland in the Diaspora that would surpass the idealized lost paradise of the Iberian peninsula. It was the task of German Jews to take the place of Abarbanel's adoptive daughter and carry on the legacy of Sephardic Jewry.
For the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1907, nevertheless, Philippson's Marannen was important less because of the distinctly secular tale of exile and redemption it invoked than because of its ability to set readers on fire and fuel their rage for reading Jewish literature. To be sure, the jubilee article cited above did not limit itself to stressing the novella's popularity. Invoking Philippson's "great love for German literature," it expressed wonder that despite living in a "monotonous region that was not even connected by a major road to the rest of humanity," our country doctor managed to create and sustain a rich inner life through the world of print culture. He "read the best writers of the past and contemporary literature" and also produced literature that became "a beloved friend" and an "enduring Bildungsmittel"-a source for the formation of character-in so many Jewish homes. Ludwig Philippson similarly praised his brother's "noble aesthetic taste," the "perfect, noble language" of his works, and the connections he nurtured with the "literary and cultural developments and intellectual life of the era." There was more at stake, however, than the power of print culture to ennoble the soul. The Philippson brothers' genius in 1837 was not just a case of creating great literature that might function as a vehicle of cultural memory and a conduit for new forms of Jewish historical consciousness. Serializing fiction in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837 worked so well because it both fulfilled and ignited the demands of the readership of this new paper for literary texts that would allow them to indulge in the pleasures of reading.
Die Marannen represents an important launching point for the development of German-Jewish literature thus not simply because of its content but because of its form, because of its indebtedness to the immense body of popular fiction that began flooding the German book market in the early nineteenth century. It was during this time, we remember, that Jews began attending German-language schools in large numbers, adopting German as a language for everyday use, and acclimating themselves to the mores and behavioral norms of bourgeois culture. At this time, an edition of the works of the influential Romantic writer Novalis (1772-1801) cost as much as sixty pounds of beef, and books were generally far too expensive for most middle-class families to afford. The rapidly growing reading public of the early nineteenth century typically turned to the novel institution of the commercial lending library for its reading material. Lending libraries began to develop in the late eighteenth century but experienced their heyday between 1815 and 1848, supported by a growing publishing industry that began to invest huge amounts of capital in the production and dissemination of literature made expressly for such institutions. During this period, when literary elites were in the midst of enshrining authors like Goethe and Schiller as high cultural icons that marked the epitome of modern German literature, it was fiction more than anything else that libraries used to lure in customers and keep afloat financially. The newly minted classics by Goethe and Schiller certainly made their way into the collections of commercial lending libraries. They did so, however, alongside hundreds of now forgotten writers who produced the Gothic novels, robber novels, ghost stories, historical novels, love stories, sentimental tales of family life, and other forms of popular literature that contemporary elites condemned for their superficiality and escapism and that scholars of German literature eventually came to group together (and typically dismiss) under the rubric of Trivialliteratur or "trivial literature."
The Philippson brothers had first-hand experience with this aspect of the book trade. During his years as a medical student in Halle, Phöbus himself ran a lending library, using the income to support his mother while apparently enabling his ten-year-old brother Ludwig to read through the library's vast collection of plays and recent novels in its entirety. As a teenager, Ludwig worked part time in a local widow's lending library, organizing its inventory while reading through hundreds of volumes. Later in life, he recalled that it was through this experience that he turned away from literature of poor taste to discover the works of Sir Walter Scott, James Fennimore Cooper, and others.
When Die Marannen appeared in 1837, Ludwig Philippson was in his late twenties, and the institution of the commercial lending library was experiencing unprecedented popularity. It was only in the 1840s, with the emergence of newspapers carrying serialized novels and the launching of inexpensive book series such as Reclam, that the lending library's function of providing affordable reading material for the middle classes began to be eclipsed. Against this backdrop, this up-and-coming rabbi's decision to start serializing fiction in the second number of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was an extremely savvy and forward-looking one from a commercial point of view. Novellas had appeared in serialized form in German periodicals since the eighteenth century, but starting in the 1830s arts and culture or Feuilleton sections began to become regular features in German newspapers. By making belles lettres an integral part of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums from the beginning, Philippson was producing a Jewish newspaper that looked like, and provided a similar reading experience to, the most up-to-date German periodicals of his day, a paper destined to be more successful than his short-lived monthly journal targeting rabbis and Jewish educators, the Israelitisches Predigt- und Schulmagazin (1834-1837).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity by Jonathan M. Hess Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixList of Illustrations....................xiv
Introduction. When Rabbis Became Novelists: The Emergence of Jewish Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany....................1
1. Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition: The Sephardic Legacy and the Making of Middlebrow Classics....................26
2. Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past....................72
3. Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance: Love, Fiction, and the Virtues of Marrying In....................111
4. Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy....................157
Concluding Remarks....................201
Notes....................209
Index....................251