Studies in German Jewish History – serie

Religion is a central concern of German literature in all centuries, and the canon looks different when this perspective is acknowledged. For example, Goethe’s fascination with evil is difficult to disentangle from the Holocaust, Moses Mendelssohn is as profound as the playwright who portrayed him, and «Princess Sabbath» deserves to be numbered among Heine’s more enchanting lyrics.This essay collection posits, and tests, the hypothesis that German literature at its best is often an expression or investigation of Judaism or Christianity at their best; but that the best German literature is not always the best-known, and vice versa. Asking whether the New Testament is anti-Jewish (and answering in the negative), essayists range through the German centuries from The Heliand to Kafka and Thomas Mann.

It is commonly held that medieval Christians viewed medieval Jews in exclusively negative terms. This is certainly the dominant opinion in much twentieth-century scholarship, and it is not wholly without justification. It is, however, an opinion that does not accurately reflect the breadth of medieval German Christian thinking about medieval German Jews. Drawing on Passion plays, hagiographical narratives and didactic literature, this monograph reveals a hitherto largely unacknowledged diversity in medieval German representations of Jews. In many of the best-attested texts from the late medieval and early modern periods, Jews appear in German literature as sympathetic, even morally exemplary figures.

This book examines the influence of the Jewish tradition on the work of the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin. It was hitherto always assumed that Benjamin’s knowledge of Judaism was very limited and that he was interested only in the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, the study of which was pioneered by his friend Gershom Scholem. However, on the latter’s recommendation, Benjamin also read Franz Joseph Molitor’s Philosophie der Geschichte oder über die Tradition (1827-1857), a massive four-volume work which presents a comprehensive overview of both mainstream and mystical aspects of the Jewish tradition. Having unearthed the most likely written source of Benjamin’s knowledge of Judaism, this study sets out to show that Benjamin’s thought was influenced considerably by Jewish concepts of language, experience and history, and that this influence is persistent enough to lend a unity to Benjamin’s work that transcends its division into an early, metaphysical and a late, materialist or Marxist stage. Within this context, the book also provides a reassessment of some of Benjamin’s key texts, from the early programmatic writings on language, philosophy and literature to the little-known Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen and the unfinished Passagen-Werk.