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Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................................................ixList of Illustrations............................................................................................................xivIntroduction. When Rabbis Became Novelists: The Emergence of Jewish Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany.....................11. Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition: The Sephardic Legacy and the Making of Middlebrow Classics........................262. Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past..............................723. Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance: Love, Fiction, and the Virtues of Marrying In.......................................1114. Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy.........................................................................157Concluding Remarks...............................................................................................................201Notes............................................................................................................................209Index............................................................................................................................251

Chapter One

Tales from the Lending Library: Popular Literature and the Origin of Jewish Belles Lettres

In July 1907, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums published an article commemorating the centennial of the birth of Phbus Philippson (1807-1870), a country doctor in a small town in the Altmark who was also the older brother of the paper's founding editor, Rabbi Ludwig Philippson (1811-1889). During his lifetime, Phbus Philippson was a published authority on cholera and the editor of medical journals. What interested the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1907, however, were less the provincial doctor's medical accomplishments than his pioneering contributions to literary life, his inauguration of a tradition of Jewish historical fiction:

Phbus, who was very gifted as a writer of novellas, recognized that depictions of the rich history of Israel in novella form could be an effective means of deepening religious feeling and could be particularly gripping for young people.... The first work of Phbus Philippson, Die Marannen [The Marranos], a tale about Spanish history at the time of the eviction of the Jews in 1492, appeared in the newly founded Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1837. Today, when the book market produces title after title in rapid succession, it is hard to imagine how Philippson's supremely inspired tale set young people on fire and inspired the older generation. Indeed, Ludwig could not get his brother to send him installments quickly enough, and he received numerous letters from members of the public impatiently demanding the next installments. When Saron, Ludwig Philippson's extensive collection of Jewish novellas, appeared in 1843, it opened with Die Marannen, which met with universal approval and was translated into many languages, including Hebrew.

The genius of the Philippson brothers' collaboration, we read here, was that it yielded powerful and gripping historical fiction, Jewish pageturners that strengthened the religious feelings of their readers while instilling in them a constant and growing desire for more such literature. In his obituary for Phbus in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1870, Ludwig Philippson similarly praised the "extraordinary success" of Die Marannen, proudly describing his brother's novella as "an entirely new and momentous phenomenon" that marked nothing less than "the beginning of the entirety of modern Jewish belles lettres."

Die Marannen, of course, is hardly the only text that literary historians have enshrined as the inaugural piece of modern Jewish fiction. Even scholars of German-Jewish literature routinely point out that the same year that witnessed the serialization of Philippson's novella in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums also saw the publication of Berthold Auerbach's novel Spinoza, and Heinrich Heine's novel fragment "Der Rabbi von Bacherach" (The Rabbi of Bacherach), which was published in 1840, was written much earlier, in the 1820s. But unlike Auerbach and Heine, who went on to write literature largely on non-Jewish themes that was read and admired by the general public, the Philippson brothers continued cultivating fiction by Jews about Jews for a primarily Jewish readership. In this sense, Philippson's novella does demarcate an important starting point. Die Marannen itself appeared in print eight times between 1837 and 1870; it was published in book form in Yiddish and Russian in the late nineteenth century; and it appeared in two different English translations and three different Hebrew translations, one of which even rendered it into verse. The following decades witnessed the production of scores of further Jewish historical novels and novellas. In keeping with Philippson's insistence that his brother's 1837 novella represented a pivotal point of departure, moreover, the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 proved a seemingly unending source of fascination for German-Jewish readers. From the German adaptation of Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars (1850) that Ludwig Philippson distributed through the Institut zur Frderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Israelite Literature) in 1860 to Philippson's own novel Jakob Tirado (1867) and Marcus Lehmann's modern orthodox classic Die Familie Y Aguillar (The Family Y Aguillar, 1873), novels and novellas about the Iberian Jewish experience became a fixture in German-Jewish literary life. This phenomenon persisted well into the twentieth century through works such as Hermann Sinsheimer's Maria Nunnez (1934) and Lion Feuchtwanger's Die Jdin von Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo, 1955).

As Ismar Schorsch argued in a seminal article two decades ago, the German-Jewish fascination with Spain formed part of a "Sephardic mystique" that was ubiquitous in liturgy, synagogue architecture, scholarship, and belles lettres in the nineteenth century. Fascinated by the immense cultural and scholarly productivity in the centuries before 1492, and particularly in the period when Spain was largely under Islamic rule, Jews in the nineteenth-century German-speaking world often fashioned Golden Age Spain as a "usable past," styling the experience of Sephardic Jewry as a model of "cultural openness, philosophic thinking, and an appreciation for the aesthetic" worthy of being imitated in the present. Whether focusing on the poets Jehuda Halevi or Abraham Ibn-Esra, the philosopher Moses Maimonides, the traveler Benjamin of Tudela, or the biblical critic and statesman Isaac Abarbanel, German Jews often found in the glories of the Iberian Jewish past a presciently modern model of cultural integration, an attractive alternative to both the experience of suffering and persecution in medieval Germany and contemporary Jewish life in Eastern Europe. And as Florian Krobb has argued, the...