Willi Goetschel

An Elective Affinity: Hans Eichner and Friedrich Schlegel

T he question I would like to pursue in this article is in which way Hans Eichner’s contribution as editor, commentator, and interpreter of Friedrich Schlegel represents a critical intervention in the study of Schlegel, and, as a consequence, in the discourse of German literary and cultural history, criticism, and the way we read—or might read—German literature in general. My point of departure is the observation that Eichner’s approach to Schlegel’s signal significance for the project of articulating a new, critical, and progressive vision of what he called Romanticism proposes the rethinking of the project of literary modernity that carries still critical force. Through the work of Eichner, Schlegel’s project has become legible as a critical form of an emancipatory humanism that offers an important alternative to the literary, philosophical, and cultural projects around 1800. Yet, more decisively, Eichner’s work reminds us that the progressive pull of Schlegel’s thought carried well into the twentieth century and, from there, with remarkable strength into the present. Schlegel’s thought—on the reading Eichner made possible—holds to a certain degree the promise of what can be called post-contemporary: carrying forward the force of critical and critically self-referential self-reflection whose momentous role in the formation of modern literature and philosophy yet awaits full recognition. Schlegel’s vision of the literary and philosophical modernity advances a dynamically open approach. One of Schlegel’s leitmotivic terms is interest or the German, or more exactly the Latin, form interesse. As the term suggests, Schlegel’s “interest” resides in the in-between, in what links, connects, but also represents the grounds on which difference is made possible in the first place, that is, the no-man’s land that constitutes the border as the condition for the possibility for any distinction. If Romanticism was too quickly mistaken for a crazed desire of total synthesis, an All-in-One and a hegemonic fantasy gone wild, it was German Romantics like Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and others who had made it the very point of their work to stage and rehearse the meltdown of such totalizing claims.

Miriam Leonard. Tragic Modernities. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. xiii + 204 pp. ISBN 978-0674743939

While modernity is typically imagined as a break with the past that freed itself from the dictate of antiquitys stage directions, Miriam Leonards Tragic Modernities reminds us that tragedy contin...

Heine's Aesthetics of Dissonance

This article examines the role that Heines articulation and performance of a dissonant aesthetics plays in the formation of Adornos Critical Theory. Reading Heine and Adorno side by side, this article argues for a reevaluation of the standard view that Adorno followed the majority opinion of relegating Heine to the B list. Instead, recognition of the critical move Adorno makes in an early but widely ignored American paper, “Towards a Reappraisal of Heine,” of 1948/49 calls for a new approach to the canonical reading of Adornos later “Heine the Wound.” Rereading Adorno with attention to his sensibility for dissonance demonstrates how Adornos own reading of Heine attends to the critically redemptive moment in Heine and its significance for Critical Theory.

Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, eds. Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics, and Culture, 1893–1958. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013. 272 pp.

losophy of Judaism in general and his conception of self-transcendence in particular would have to address a series of complex issues. It would have to determine the common ground and differences between Heschel and his hasidic sources and other neo-hasidic thinkers such as Hillel Zeitlin. It would have to explore Heschel’s plea for reorienting the self toward God with similar expressions emanating from the Musar movement. It would have to compare Heschel’s ideal of a human shift toward divine concerns with Joseph Dov Soloveitchik’s portrayal of the self-abnegation of Adam II and Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s theocentric philosophy. It would also require examining the possibility that Heschel’s conception of self-transcendence—both its anthropological and theological dimensions—is an implied critique of the naturalism of Mordecai Kaplan, his colleague at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Finally, it would be fruitful to investigate the connection between Heschel’s notion of God in search of man and his call for selftransitivity, on the one hand, and Buber’s dialogical philosophy, on the other. Held discusses some of these questions (115, 222–225, 250 n. 197). But a more comprehensive treatment would provide greater context for the emergence of Heschel’s conceptions. Finally, I would like briefly to relate to the significance of Held’s study for illuminating the reception of Heschel’s thought among American Jews. Held does not compare his understanding of Heschel with the American Jewish representation of Heschel, which supports his iconic status. Such a comparison, I believe, would reveal the considerable gap between the way Heschel has been understood and employed and his actual religious philosophy. In the American Jewish Renewal movement, for example, Heschel is perceived as a religious visionary who realizes that the foundation of religious life is spiritual experience. But Held demonstrates that Heschel ascribes to spirituality intermediary value: it must lead to worship (‘avodah) and God-centeredness. Held’s analysis also problematizes the use of Heschel’s involvement in liberal social causes to demonstrate his support for modern religious liberalism. As Held establishes, Heschel’s prophetic moral criticism of American society flows from his critique of modernity, which he views as overly anthropocentric and utilitarian.

Writing, Dialogue, and Marginal Form: Mendelssohn’s Style of Intervention

Mendelssohn has often been described as a popular philosopher with a writing style that is easy to understand, distinguished by clarity, elegance, and eloquence. I have no intention to dispute this view except for the label of popular philosopher, which appears to be a problematic mis-categorization of a philosopher otherwise extolled for his subtle and differentiated argumentation.

Moira Gatens, ed. Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009, xiv, 239 pp.

historical religions” (41). Elsewhere in the same essay, the reader finds an excellent summary of Leo Strauss’s distinction between medieval and modern Enlightenment (without an attribution to Strauss). The blurb on the back of both volumes states that Jacob Taubes was “one of the great Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century.” The scion of a minor hasidic dynasty and of many generations of talmudic scholars, that was certainly his aspiration, though readers of these volumes may well regard the characterization as hyperbolic. Yet readers will see that Taubes’s mind was wide-ranging, frequently penetrating, and eminently capable of thinking against the grain of received opinion. He specialized in insights—especially in tracing parallels in different religious and historical contexts. Of these, Siegfried Kracauer, in a comment on Taubes’s comparison of Gnosticism and Surrealism noted that Taubes’s structural comparisons “are as misleading as they are revelatory. They are misleading because they are achieved at a great distance from the given material” (112). Yet, Kracauer continued, “this same formidable distance from the material, which is responsible for the dubiousness of the structural comparisons ... also enables them to play a revelatory role. Taken from a great height, they remind one of aerial photographs; just like these, they allow one to catch a glimpse of normally invisible configurations of the broader landscape they survey... .” (112). That seems like a fairer verdict on Jacob Taubes. But thanks to the editorial labors of Fonrobert and Engel, and the translation assistance of Mara H. Benjamin and William Rauscher, readers of English can now judge for themselves.

Steven E. Aschheim. Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. xi, 194 pp.

expurgated) also meant, as the eighteenth-century priest, legist, and firm supporter of the Roman Casa dei catecumeni Antonio Ricciulo said, condoning the effectively legal kidnapping of Jewish children whose converted (ex-Jewish) relatives had “offered” them for baptism; the legal excuse was that the state that guaranteed legal observance also saw itself as empowered to determine the welfare of children, including their souls. Whatever is asserted about its theoretical potential for Jewish continuity, in practice, censorship was a tool in the hands of a regime determined to end Jewish existence. As for the so-called autonomous Jewish space—whether that of the ghetto itself or some amorphous intellectual sphere—it would have been liberating only if we accept that in the ghetto, as Bonfil has argued and Raz-Krakotzkin seconds, Jews were freer to maintain their Judaism and acculturate. Evidence says acculturation preceded the ghetto: The syntax (not just interjected words) of the Hebrew found in notarial acts and entries in the record books of various communities is purely Italian, and from well before the ghetto period; rentals were recorded in Italian directly. The Jewish and Christian diet was essentially the same, as were dress and modes of popular expression. Not every ghetto was identical, but it is hard to argue that ghetto space itself and a set of approved books were the engine of modernizing changes. Nonetheless, and to return to the positive note on which I began, this book is worth the read. Raz-Krakotzkin writes history by emphasizing the nuances and inconsistencies intrinsic to cultural change and acculturation, a method that is not to be superciliously dismissed, as at least one writer did, by calling it “hedging.” It is through pointing out gradations and distinction that we are led to wonder what converts and censors really intended and whether true change in Jewish–Christian mutuality was taking place. This book thus challenges us, and regardless of how we regard its conclusions, it should not be put aside. Raz-Krakotzkin himself is aware of the limits, which he often spells out. If readers follow the author’s own careful lead, they will be well rewarded.

Moses Mendelssohn: La naissance du judaïsme moderne

Initiating a revival of the complete works of Moses Mendelssohn and invigorating a renaissance in Mendelssohn studies with his magisterial biography, Alexander Altmann reanimated Mendelssohn research during the 1960–1980s, with a lasting impact. Recovering the pioneering research done in Weimar Germany that, with the demise of German Jewry, had sunk into oblivion, Altmann’s mission seemed to be to retrieve the torch from a lost world and pass it on to a new generation. Altmann’s vision still dominates much of our approach to and perceptions of Mendelssohn, though his own view of Mendelssohn remains somewhat of a puzzle. Often taken as a work of love and devotion, a letter by Altmann published in 1999 reveals a startlingly ambivalent, if not complicated, relationship to his object of study and scholarship. Writing to Gershom Scholem, whose Sabbatai Sevi had been published at the same time as Altmann’s Mendelssohn biography, he muses about the fact that the two books represent, as it were, companion pieces of some kind: “In einem gewissen Sinn war ja auch Mendelssohn ein ‘falscher Messias.’” Although the coincidence of the two towering studies is indeed startling, their agendas stand at opposite ends of historical study. If Scholem’s book represents the Jewish historian’s ultimate masterwork in the study of counter-history, Altmann’s is an attempt to reclaim Mendelssohn’s central importance, not only for the history of German philosophy and culture but also for Jewish intellectual history. Despite—or even because of—the obvious differences between Scholem and Altmann, Altmann’s remark highlights an aspect of the legacy of Mendelssohn research that still informs the way Mendelssohn is seen today. The case of Mendelssohn is paradigmatic for Jewish studies because it poses a methodological question about how to study the lacunae that scholarship and research have systematically pushed to the margins and that traditional concerns have rendered invisible or illegible. The critical study of Mendelssohn, therefore, also must address the problem of how to recover, reexamine, and rethink aspects that research and scholarship have so effectively eclipsed. Mendelssohn, in a way, is the classic that modern Jewish philosophy never had. As the never-ending edition of Mendelssohn’s works approaches its completion 80 years after the first volumes appeared in Weimar Germany, the edition signals, more than anything else, the need for an up-to-date edition. Ironically, the publication of the complete edition of Mendelssohn’s writings underscores the fate of an author whose legitimate claim to classic status remains unrequited. The Mendelssohn edition has already become historical before its completion, and thus it is a case study of the complicated, if not conflicted, story of the Jewish and German reception of Mendelssohn.