Nils Roemer

Turning Defeat into Victory: Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Martyrs of 1096

In the nineteenth century the widely accepted and christologically bound understanding of Jewish history also dominated the new philosophy of history, which retained the conventional picture of Judaism as an outdated religion, an anachronism superseded in the course of world history by Christianity. Within this conception of the unfolding of world history, Judaism was denied of independent historical value, and was instead associated with decline and dissolution. What from the point of German-Jewish historians was a long-lasting and heroic struggle, was in the eyes of their German counterparts an endless and meaningless series of episodes that had lost all significance once the idea of monotheism had spread and the Jewish state was destroyed. This is particularly characteristic of Hegels philosophy of history.1 In his earlier writings, even before he had formulated a comprehensive philosophy of history, Hegel took issue with the essence of Jewish history. Rejecting the possibility that Jewish history could embody profound tragedy, he wrote: The tragedy of the Jewish people is not a Greek tragedy, it cannot evoke fear or compassion, since both of these arise from a necessary false step of a beautiful creature, while that [destiny of the Jews] can only arouse repugnance. The destiny of the Jewish people is the fate of Macbeth ... who had to be crushed by his own beliefs.2

Longing, belonging, and the making of Jewish consumer culture

This is the introductory chapter of this book, which illustrates the extent to which Jewish consumerism is both an important realm of scholarly interest as well as a field of inquiry that further illuminates existing studies of politics, art, and economics with questions of integration and acceptance, class, and gender. The book suggests that this endeavor offers new readings of Jewish longings and belongings that point to new directions for the study of Jewish identity, culture, integration and exclusion but also above all significantly widens our concept of culture and makes this realm more important in its own right, alongside legal, political, social, economic, literary, and philosophical investigations of the modern Jewish experience. Keywords: consumerism; Jewish belongings; Jewish culture; Jewish longings; modern Jewish experience

The City of Worms in Modern Jewish Traveling Cultures of Remembrance

raveling is a key element of modernity as a form of mobility, displacement, and change. Jews’ urbanization and cultural and religious renewal have signaled their departure from traditional social relations and relocation to larger urban centers. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews migrated in Germany from rural areas and small towns to the larger cities as part of their social advancement. Their experience of dislocation coincided with the proliferation of traveling as a leisure activity, and visits to smaller towns like Worms became fairly common among German Jews. Memories as well as extended family networks continued to connect urban Jews with their former hometowns.1 Beyond existing kinship ties, the experience of migration and modernization created a culture of nostalgia for Jews that secured the importance of smaller communities, which were otherwise dwarfed by the large urban Jewish centers in Germany. In as much as Jews moved out of the Judengasse (Jewish alley) and away from small and rural areas, they recalled a past that was quickly vanishing.2 The presence of physical markers gave legitimacy and force to the creation of traditions.3 In Worms, the physical perseverance of the synagogue, the cemetery, and religious artifacts and historical documents anchored remembrance and, thereby, bestowed continuity upon the T

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

Abstract This article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

Secularization Theories and Their Discontents

The apparent return of religion (which, despite claims to the contrary, never retired from the public sphere) and the new interest in political theology have given secularization theories new relevance. It would seem that with the fading of the postmodern allure, the unabated claim of religion can no longer be ignored or rationalized away. While the proliferation and appreciation of secularization theories in response seems to offer only partial and temporary relief, some critics still keep running with them. Yet as we can no longer ignore that secularization theories are more part of the problem than the solution, it might be worthwhile to examine the concept of secularization itself and scrutinize some of the aspects of its genealogy more carefully. The onset of new exigencies following the fizzling out of the postmodern combined with the relentless advance of globalization has taken the question of religion and secularization to a new level of urgency. What exactly is secularization and, for that matter, its correlate religion? More importantly, how do they interact? Remarkably, these are not just today’s questions but fraught with their own history. Exploring the history of the concept of secularization may help us complicate and differentiate a narrative whose popular currency has blunted much of its critical edge. Let us take a look at a literary example that rehearses the problem and brings the critical issue to the point. In a crucial but rarely examined passage of his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymen Years, Goethe offers a striking object lesson. Comically exposing the inadequacy of the esthetic program of the Nazarenes—a group of epigonal painters whose neo-devout attitude was, in Goethe’s eyes, in poor taste—the passage speaks to a deeper point in the novel’s scrutiny of the project of Bildung as a social, political, and theological–political critique of modernity. In the first pages of this Bildungsroman, the protagonist Wilhelm Meister

Moritz Steinschneider and the noble dream of objectivity

The critical assessment of Steinschneiders work at the turn of the nineteenth century was part of a much wider fascination and engagement with scholarship and the value of objectivity in general, when realism dominated literary and visual culture. Steinschneiders eulogies indeed reverberate with the fierce nineteenth-century debates about the nature of Jewish scholarship and about the ideals of detachment and objectivity. During the 1840s, when the campaigns for emancipation and reform intensified and converged, the young Steinschneider prepared himself for a career in the rabbinate, working actively for the rejuvenation of Judaism and supporting the efforts of Zacharias Frankel. The debate over detachment and objectivity acquired an even greater virulence with the emergence of Zionism. To be sure, some Zionists saw nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship as a source of legitimization for the national understanding of the Jews. Keywords:Jews; Judaism; Moritz Steinschneider; Zacharias Frankel; Zionism

The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749-1939: Emancipation and Its Discontent (review)

Introduction Enlightenment German Jewry before Emancipation How the Enlightenment saw the Jews Lessing and Toleration Emancipation: Dohm versus Humboldt Moses Mendelssohn and the Rational Jew Mendelssohns Legacy Liberalism Jews and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century Schnitzler: Liberalism and Irony The European Humanism of Stefan Zweig Freud: Science versus Religion Antisemitism Varieties of Antisemitism Literary Images of the Jew Assimilation The Meaning of Assimilation Self-Hatred Hyperacculturation Dissimilation The Jewish Renaissance The Eastern Jews The Jew as Oriental Zionism Abbreviations Select Bibliography