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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253026279 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press (Ips) |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2017 |
| Series: | German Jewish Cultures |
| Pages: | 194 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Forget Assimilation
Subjectivity and German-Jewish History
Forgetting Assimilation
In a famous lecture delivered at the World Jewish Congress in Brussels in 1966, Gershom Scholem recalled the history of German-Jewish assimilation. It is an astonishing and elegant lecture — piercingly incisive, breathtaking in its synthesis. It tracks the path from the relative autonomy and integrity of a pre-emancipated Jewish community in Germany through the ambitious, idealistic, but what turned out to be fatally wrong-headed project of assimilation. This outline has come in the meantime to be known as the orthodox view of German-Jewish history. There are many brilliant insights in Scholem's lecture, "Jews and Germans," which also has its share of untenable assertions. One of the former that has been little noted is Scholem's disclaimer, early in the lecture, that his title forced him onto what he understood to be epistemologically and ontologically shaky ground: "For not all 'Germans' are Germans and not all 'Jews' are Jews" is the elegant truth forgotten by those citing the lecture, neglected in the historiography it inspired, and conveniently forgotten by Scholem himself throughout the rest of his address. To speak of "the Germans" and "the Jews" in this period — the scare quotes are Scholem's — is to descend into the unsustainable realm of generalization, worthy of the coarsest antisemites. The philosophically trained Scholem did not bring himself to say that the embrace of such "questionable categories" is justified; he said that the ability properly to differentiate rather than to use gross categories has been hampered by the memory of a cataclysm executed by people who saw no use for any such distinctions. This was a sympathetic claim, perhaps, but not an intellectually persuasive one, and one has the sense that Scholem, too, is embarrassed by the lack of rigor.
To remember assimilation in the way Scholem would like — a way, that is, that would make sense of the catastrophe of German Judaism, as well as the hope of the fledgling State of Israel — it seems he had to forget the complex ways individual consciousnesses brushed against the grain of abstract collectivities. The poignancy of this gesture derives from the fact that Scholem was speaking not only as an exponent of the first generation of the orthodox school of German-Jewish historiography but also as a member of the last generation of its objects of study. When he spoke of the "emotional confusion of the German Jews between 1820 and 1920" — a confusion that he argued was essential to understand if one is to grasp the fraught phenomenon of "German Jewishness" — the listeners were aware that scholem was one of those Jews. He was both subject and object of his own analysis, and this is the key to a rhetoric that slipped easily from categories of identity that were in play for assimilated Jews and those available to post-holocaust historians.
As historian and historical object, scholem offers an extreme case of a tendency I want to call attention to: histories of German-Jewish culture sometimes suffer from an excess of empathy with their subjects. By an excess of empathy, I mean that scholars have assumed a problematic that one might call the German-Jewish identity crisis, as well as the categories of identity and culture that undergird it. This empathy, and these assumptions, have been the source of a scholarly production that by any relative measure must be considered large, especially in proportion to the size of the demographic group on which it focuses. This scholarly literature has been both interesting and critical. Yet i want to argue (somewhat polemically) that the limitations of these approaches have led to a kind of impasse that provocatively parallels the situation of the producers of German-speaking Jewish culture in the first third of the twentieth century.
As a strategy to get beyond what has been described as a dead end in the historiography and to open up questions it has obscured so far, i suggest we begin by forgetting what scholem chose to remember and remembering, and expanding on, what he invoked only to forget. To do so, it will be necessary to examine both the historiography and its subjects. Assimilation is a problematic both have shared. It is one, however, that needs to be subjected to critical analysis, whereas the categories and concepts sustaining it have with few exceptions been taken for granted by historical subjects as well as historians. Chief among these is the notion of identity inherent in the dominant image of assimilation.
That model of identity is one that assumes a spectrum of possible identifications running from the imagined pole of absolute Jewish identification (what Franz Rosenzweig called "dissimilation"), at one end, to complete appropriation of German identity at the other. This model was always meant to be flexible in particular ways, not least because the notions of German and Jewish identification were open: "total" assimilation might mean baptism and intermarriage, or it could mean the retention of Jewish religious adherence in a purely private way. The most extreme pole of Jewish identification could likewise be understood in terms of religious orthodoxy, secular Jewish nationalism, Jewish spiritualism, or some other cultural and intellectual engagement specifically identified as Jewish. it is often (if not always) assumed that these poles reflect ideal types, and that actual individuals find themselves variously along this spectrum. The model clearly makes place for degrees of complexity; it may even have developed as a nuanced alternative to a simple binary of assimilated and nonassimilated.
Yet even allowing for all this variation, the spectrum of relative assimilation is an inadequate model and a deceptive one. As the late Amos Funkenstein showed in his 1995 essay "The Dialectics of assimilation," the long-lived distinctions between "spontaneous" and "acquired" cultural character, accidental adaptation and essential adoption, or stable essence and assimilatory appearance are all themselves powerfully ideological instruments of segregation rather than descriptors of a cultural condition. While cultural adaptation has been uneven over time and space, it has nonetheless been universal; what is taken as authentic or traditional is often another example of dynamic interaction with external cultures.
Scholem knew too much to deny this but justified his narrative by distinguishing the German influence on the pre-emancipated Jewish community — through a "barely conscious process of osmosis" — from the indelicate, programmatic force of self-conscious assimilation. The latter process would come to produce a "sinister and dangerous dialectic" whereby Jews were both required to surrender their group identity and at the same time despised for the willingness and ability to do so. This analysis of the double bind of the emancipation-assimilation pact is standard fare in the tradition of historiography represented by scholem's talk. It is, therefore, all the more surprising that it is Scholem who points out what in his words "is now often forgotten" — namely, that assimilating Jews wished in some form to retain their Jewishness. While assimilation as an abstraction (or even as a social process promoted by a minority of community leaders) theoretically moves without equivocation toward the dissolution of Jewishness and total absorption of, and into, gentile German culture, individuals held on to their Jewishness "as a kind of heritage, as a creed, as an element unknowable and indefinable, yet clearly present in their consciousness."
On one level, we are confronted with the paradox of the secular Jew, who, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi reminds us, is both a stranger and a more diverse sort of creature than this "blandly generic term" would seem to indicate. On another level, Scholem's observation brings into view what his own focus on assimilation as a paradigm, a program, and a seemingly inexorable historical process obscures. In their lives and consciousnesses, actual Jews did not experience their relationship to Jewishness (or to Germanness, for that matter) in the zero-sumgame terms of the politics of assimilation. Yerushalmi, taking a skeptical stance toward the uneven and inconsistent positions of these men and women who hovered in an "undefined yet somehow real Jewishness," diagnoses their Judaism and Jewishness as contentless, "pure subjectivity."
Scholem's and Yerushalmi's critiques of the secular Jew, especially the assimilated German Jew, identify the surrender of an integral Judaism as the root of an insoluble confusion, neurosis, or malaise. What the study of secular Judaism needs is a sustained analysis of these troubled subjectivities and not the wholesale pathologization of the secular condition it has seen. Such a turn to interiority could help answer questions about modern German-Jewish cultural production that remain unasked by the paradigms of assimilation used by orthodox historiography — as well as by its most articulate critics.
A prominent revision of the orthodox school is represented by the provocative work of David Sorkin, who in several influential contributions has also sought to leave behind the governing concepts of emancipation and assimilation. Working principally in the formative period of German-Jewish assimilation, Sorkin has argued that an internal "ideology of emancipation" was the motor driving the creation of a German-Jewish "subculture," which by its very nature was invisible to its own adherents, who only imagined that the process they were living through was effectually an abandonment of community. This argument, as Samuel Moyn points out, "sublates" or historicizes the orthodox view rather than repudiating it — it lifts the veil that assimilation held before its own eyes but preserves the integrity of the categories on which the ideology of assimilation depended. Sorkin's explanation remains so profoundly structuralist as to leave little room for any subjectivity or indeed to allow self-consciousness at any level. As Anthony La Vopa points out, "The irony Sorkin finds is structural, not 'subjective.'" Sorkin himself is explicit about this distinction at several points, arguing that "the community's invisibility [to itself] thus resulted from a disparity between ideology and social reality. Invisibility was a structural and not a subjective problem." In turning to the concept of ideology, Sorkin relies on an assumption of totalized false consciousness. He recognizes that ideology requires "a coherent system of ideas and symbols" as well as an institutional foundation. Yet, perhaps understandably, he shies from what I have described elsewhere as the contradictory ways in which subjects (the actors in a process) understand themselves within an ideological system or the ways they are "given identity." This seems, at first, to come down to the problematic dichotomy of structure and agency, even though many historians acknowledge that the dichotomy is a false one. Structures and agents — or objective conditions and subjective consciousnesses — are so mutually entwined within the historical process that thinking about them apart from one another is senseless. Even the words "agency" and "agents" are to some degree deceptive, because they suggest a level of self-consciousness and deliberation that is in many cases beyond historical actors as they move through their world.
In focusing on the complicated and often self-contradictory subjective experiences of individuals, we are not abandoning the notion of shared historical experience, and we are not denying the possibility of writing a collective history. But the foundation of any such history must be stronger than the fictions a community told itself. A different picture emerges when historians attend to the wide range of ways in which German Jews understood themselves to be Jews and to be German.
Postassimilationist Reflections
When the novelist Jakob Wassermann (1873-1934) published his memoir, My Life as German and Jew, he seemed to be making a new claim for the possibilities and impossibilities contained within the categories German and Jew. Resisting the notion of separate or even opposing racial, ethnic, or cultural identities, his life story and the aesthetic path of his works were laid out to avoid even the term "German-Jewish" and, in the process, to offer an alternative to the model of symbiosis. Instead, Wassermann and his work were simultaneously "German" and "Jewish," at odds with themselves, and this dialectical rather than dialogical relationship was central to the production of literature. Wassermann depicts his struggle not as the highly individuated experience of an artist with a dual identity but as a universal condition. His descriptions of German identity sound more like discussions of the Jewish question, just as the tangential existence of the struggling writer is merely a sharpened reflection of everyday human existence.
This memoir is made remarkable by all these border crossings, not least because of its emergence just at the moment when famously essentialized notions of German-Jewish difference were being solidified. Yet Wassermann's text also participates in these discursive processes. Identity in his book is forged by blood and climate, by insuperable tradition and by unassimilable foreign culture. Wassermann presents himself as German and Jew, because there are such things as Germans and Jews, collective identities that define their members as similar to all others within — yet still distinct from all those outside. As do the antisemitic and Zionist challenges to the Jewish participation in German-language culture, Wassermann takes for granted the status of his self and work as question or problem. For all its complexity, My Life as German and Jew, by virtue of its very appearance, perches on the crest of the tide rather than riding against it. Although Gershom Scholem identified Wassermann's text as a "cry into the emptiness, one which recognized itself as such" — and which also beckoned scholem himself to taste the substance of Palestine — it shares with Scholem's critiques a universe of terms. Within this universe, one could champion or oppose assimilation, but doing either implied a silent concession to the existence of a German-Jewish identity crisis.
The generations I focus on in this chapter are ones that could be called post-assimilationist. Steven Aschheim has used the term more narrowly to denote certain German Jews at the turn of the century and later, "second generation" Jewish nationalists and Zionists in particular. But whether Zionist or liberal, the Jews of the generation coming of age at the turn of the century and shortly after were all in some sense postassimilationist. For them, the classic liberal-assimilationist position, with its optimism about a potentially unproblematic fusion of Jewish (private) identities with German public ones, was no longer available. As anyone who has reviewed the primary sources of the period will testify, liberal and Zionist Jews, as well as their non-Jewish counterparts from the socialists to the antisemites, had all come to argue their different positions from a shared conceptual universe that suggested a different set of assumptions from those of official assimilationist discourse.
Postassimilationist Historiography
Postassimilationism can also productively be applied to our historiographical perspectives. Like other "post-" labels (poststructuralist or post-Marxist, for instance), postassimilationism should not necessarily suggest an openly antagonistic relationship to the ideology of assimilation; to the contrary, it suggests a position that clearly follows from the failed logic of its predecessor. This succession, furthermore, takes place with an extreme uneasiness about the conclusions of its forerunner yet is also dependent on it. Thus, the passage from assimilation to postassimilation might be presumed to be dialectical rather than merely successive or progressive, and some historiographical reviews and debates that are relevant to these lines of inquiry have sought to follow this path. They have sought to chart the course away from a German-Jewish historiographical literature that is more or less strictly formed along lines mirroring the ideological alternatives of Jewish identity (i.e., national, or Zionist, and liberal, or sometimes cultural, which is not to be confused with the designation of liberal internal to German Judaism), and despite their sometime disagreement, they have achieved a consensus that considers viewing these alternatives in a starkly dichotomous way as obsolete.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Modernism Without Jews?"
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Copyright © 2017 Scott Spector.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Historicizing German-Jewish Subjectivity1. Forget Assimilation: Subjectivity and German-Jewish History2. Modernism Without Jews: A Counter-Historical Argument3. The Secularization Question: Germans, Jews, and the Historical Understanding of Modernity4. Edith Stein's Passing Gestures: Intimate Histories, Empathic Portraits5. Two Vultures: Freud Between "Jewish Science" and Humanism6. Elsewhere in Austria: Jewish Writing between "Habsburg Myth" and "Central Europe Effect"7. Max Brod's Homelands, Kafka's Patrimony8. Kafka and Literary Modernism9. The Law of the Letter: Kafka's Correspondence with Milena JesenskáIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Scott Spector has been advocating for a subject-based understanding of German-Jewish modernity throughout his distinguished career. This book brings this work together and culminates in a new and compelling approach to this much-studied topic."
The essays in this collection are virtuoso performances demonstrating how Scott Spector's radical textual method could be applied to a range of controversial intellectuals. There is, of course, a vast body of interpretation surrounding these figures, and it is a credit to Spector's erudition, originality and synthetic abilities that he nevertheless has something new to say about them.
Scott Spector has been advocating for a subject-based understanding of German-Jewish modernity throughout his distinguished career. This book brings this work together and culminates in a new and compelling approach to this much-studied topic.
The essays in this collection are virtuoso performances demonstrating how Scott Spector's radical textual method could be applied to a range of controversial intellectuals. There is, of course, a vast body of interpretation surrounding these figures, and it is a credit to Spector's erudition, originality and synthetic abilities that he nevertheless has something new to say about them.
Scott Spector has been advocating for a subject-based understanding of German-Jewish modernity throughout his distinguished career. This book brings this work together and culminates in a new and compelling approach to this much-studied topic.