Jonathan M. Hess

Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German Jewish Ghetto Fiction

Nineteenth-century intellectuals often decried nostalgia as a widespread social and cultural malaise, issuing harsh indictments of contemporaries who expressed their discomforts over the rapid pace of modernization and urbanization by fixating on an idealized past. Yet as this article emphasizes in its discussion of the fiction of Leopold Kompert, nostalgic longings for the past were not always a symptom of dislocation in the present. Kompert, one of the earliest and most popular producers of ghetto literature in nineteenth-century Europe, geared his nostalgic tales of traditional Jewish life in his native Bohemia at an upwardly mobile Jewish community increasingly identified with German culture as well as at the general reading public. Through an analysis of his works and a study of their reception, this article explores the ways in which fiction helped promote a vision of the ghetto as a usable past. By memorializing traditional forms of Jewish life in respectable aesthetic forms, Komperts tales claimed cultural respectability for the immediate Jewish past. Ghetto literature sought in this way to secure Jews a form of bourgeois cultural respectability that might serve as a marker of their newly-found—or yet-to-be achieved—middle-class status. An investigation of ghetto fiction and its reception illuminates thus both the dynamic role of German-Jewish literature in reinventing tradition and the ways in which this process of acculturation was inextricable from the quest to produce Jewish literature that might claim to be secular culture of the highest possible order.

Fictions of a German-Jewish Public: Ludwig Jacobowski's Werther the Jew and Its Readers

[The German Jew] has to work with one hand to participate in the construction of a national culture while brandishing a weapon in the other hand—against Germans. It is a tragic constellation. Only he who feels this conflict with full force and nevertheless still decides to fight, in spite of it all and without further ado—he alone has the right to call himself an assimilated Jew. . . . For those who cannot bear the difficulty of this situation and do not want to be baptized, Zionism is the only solution.

Shylock’s Daughters: Philosemitism, Popular Culture, And The Liberal Imagination

Abstract S. H. Mosenthal’s blockbuster drama Deborah, popularized in the English-speaking world as Leah, The Forsaken, delivered generations of nineteenth-century theatergoers fantasies about Jewish women. This paper explores the rich performance history of this work, offering a new perspective on the role of popular culture in launching distinctly liberal forms of philosemitism.