German-Jewish Literature (Jewish Studies)

This article investigates the intellectual history of the argument for the antiquity of Ex 34,11–26. In the contemporary debate about pentateuchal theory, a question that remains insufficiently addressed is how and why the idea originally developed that the unit represents an ancient, independent, pre-Deuteronomic legal source. Wellhausen credited the idea to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s »Zwo bisher unerörterte biblische Fragen …« (1773). Like Goethe, Wellhausen regarded the unit as a »ritual Decalogue,« in contrast to the »ethical Decalogue« of Exodus 20. The distinction helped Wellhausen consolidate the classical model of the documentary hypothesis: he attributed the cultic Decalogue to the Yahwist and the ethical one to the Elohist. Despite the importance of Goethe’s essay to the history of pentateuchal criticism, it is not clear that its arguments have previously been investigated. The article addresses equally Goethe's construction of the Jew as "other" and as particularistic, in contrast to the German Protestant as "self" and universal. The article demonstrates that Goethe could not have read read Spinoza's Tractatus, despite the common belief otherwise.

Keywords:
Julius Wellhausen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Baruch Spinoza, Zwo bisher unerörterte biblische Fragen, Dekalog, Decalolgue, cultic Decalog, ethical Decalog, German Jewish history, Christian Jewish relations, Ten Commandments, history of biblical scholarship, Exod 34:11-26; German Romanticism

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Horizons of Modernity explores how two key themes, tragedy and Judaism, figure in the writings of 20th-century Jewish philosophers. Taking Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Emmanuel Levinas as focus, the book examines how these thinkers understand the origins and structures of both tragedy and Judaism, including the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of each. Horizons of Modernity studies the philosophers’ claims regarding tragedy as a performance of the subject’s self-constitution and Judaism as grounding for a political ethics of responsibility for the other. By engaging these philosophical considerations, the book provides an illuminating window onto a specific conception of aesthetic individualization and political ethics in the face of the crisis of modernity.

In der Reflexion der Moderne spielen häufig Denkfiguren eine wichtige Rolle, die zeitlich und strukturell vor der Moderne verankert sind. Horizonte der Moderne geht mit Tragödie und Judentum zwei Themenkomplexen nach, deren Ursprünge in der Antike liegen und die im Denken von Hermann Cohen und nachfolgend bei Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Joseph B. Soloveitchik und Emmanuel Lévinas auf unterschiedliche Weise aufgefaßt und zueinander in Beziehung gesetzt werden. Im Spannungsfeld von Ästhetik und Ethik erscheint die Tragödie als Ort der Selbstverständigung des Subjekts, während im Zentrum des Blicks auf das Judentum die Verantwortung für den Anderen und der Bezug zur Gemeinschaft stehen. Damit werden die beiden Pole europäischer Kulturkonzeptionen, ästhetische Individualisierung einerseits und politische Ethik andererseits, im Horizont ihrer dyadischen Herkunft betrachtet. Der Band gibt Einblick in einen Diskurs, der angesichts der Krise der Moderne nach deren ideengeschichtlichen Quellen fragt.

Hermann Sinsheimer, a German-Jewish writer and theater critic, published Maria Nunnez: Eine Jüdische Überlieferung with Berlin's Philo Verlag in 1934. This historical novel about sixteenth-century Marranos on their crises of identity, using them to illuminate the novel's unmentioned center-the crisis of German-Jewish identity in the 1930s. Maria, disguised as a young man, is doubly disguised through her Marrana identity. These two layers of "transvestism," however, do more than simply parallel each other or the German-Jewish identity crisis. Within nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses about "Jewishness," gender and transgendering not only mirror the uneasy relationship between Jewish and national identities, but are implicated in the gendering of "Jewishness" itself. Through his appropriation of the figure of the schöne Jüdin and his references to the New Jew, Sinsheimer wrestles with the way in which antisemitic discourses have configured male and female Jews within interesecting discourses of masculinity, femininity and sexuality. In reaction to stereotypes of hyperfeminized, sensualized Jewish women and ineffectual, emasculated Jewish men, Sinsheimer attempts to define a "masculine Jewishness" and to present a path for Jewish empowerment by depicting both his male and female Jewish characters as empowered and masculinized by their commitment to Judaism and Jewry.

Jonatan Meir, "The Discovery and Publication of Joseph Perl’s Yiddish Writings"

The attitude of Tarnopol satirist Joseph Perl (1773–1839) towards the Yiddish language has been discussed by a number of scholars. In particular, researchers have examined his views with regard to his most well-known satire, Sefer Megaleh temirin, which was printed in Hebrew in Vienna, 1819, with a partial Yiddish translation of the work appearing in Vilna, 1938. However, there remains much to be said concerning the creative process which guided Perl’s writing in Yiddish, as well as the later discovery and publication of his Yiddish works, both of which are chapters in the wider story of the development of Yiddish literature in the first half of the nineteenth century and the increasing scholarly interest in it at the outset of the twentieth century. This article briefly describes these multifaceted matters and then offers suggestions for the future study of Perl’s writing in particular, and maskilic Yiddish literature in general.

Gershom Scholem in Deutschland
Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit
Hrsg. v. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok u. Matthias Morgenstern

Die Biographie des in Berlin geborenen und ab 1923 in Jerusalem lebenden Kabbala-Forschers Gershom Gerhard Scholem ist von den Katastrophen und Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts geprägt. Im Horizont des für Scholem ambivalenten deutsch-jüdischen Verhältnisses nehmen die Autoren des Bandes seinen Werdegang im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik in den Blick sowie die Bedeutung, die er als israelischer Gesprächspartner für die Zeitgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland hatte. Die Beziehungen zu Walter Benjamin und Hannah Arendt, zu dem Theologen Otto Michel und dem Verleger Siegfried Unseld dokumentieren auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen Scholems Verbindung zu Deutschland, die ihn auch bei persönlicher Lyrik und sogar bei seiner wissenschaftlichen Prosa zur jüdischen Mystik begleitete.

In this paper, I will outline a rather bold claim: that Salomon  Maimon is the only modern Jewish philosopher worth of the title. Unlike many others, I do not take a Jewish philosopher to be someone who is (a) Jewish and (b) a philosopher, but rather suggest that Jewish philosophy is the attempt to provide a well-argued and informed account of Jewish religious and cultural beliefs and practices. The demand for an informed account will play a central role in this paper. It would seem that just as a philosopher of mathematics needs to have a good grasp of mathematics, a scholar of Jewish philosophy needs to have a good grasp of the Jewish literary world. To the best of my knowledge, this has not been the case with the majority of modern Jewish philosophers; arguably, the majority of modern authors who wrote about the Wesen des Judentums were largely ignorant of this literary tradition. But before we can address this radical and combative claim, we will need to discuss two other characteristics of modern Jewish philosophy: (1) its internalization of the anti-Semitic view of Jewish culture as a particularism that is opposed to Christian universalism, and (2) its biblicalism, i.e., the attempt to construct a Protestant version of Judaism that imitates German Lutheranism, and hence justify the inclusion of the Jew into noble German society.