Synopses & Reviews
This book is an erudite literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, Ritchie Robertson offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. No other study by a single author deals with German-Jewish relations so comprehensively and over such a long period of literary history.
Review
"Robertson's work offers a well-versed survey and provides, despite his disclaimer, a comprehensive view of the topic that leaves only the field of postwar German literature untouched."-- The Jewish Quarterly Review
Review
"The reader will appreciate Robertson's fresh insights and his ability to synthesize and elucidate a vast body of primary and secondary sources."--Choice
"[This book] can be mined for its extensive translations and summaries and engaged with as a masterful synthesis and interpretation of the major themes and dilemmas of modern Jewish and European history."--Religious Studies Review
"[A] stimulating, wide-ranging, well-written, and thoroughly researched investigation.... This is a book intended not only to inform its reader, but also to challenge comfortable assumptions. On both levels, it succeeds brilliantly.... Without a doubt, The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749-1939 deserves to become a standard work for historians, literary scholars, and the interested general public."--The Bulletin of the Center for Holocaust Studies
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [505]-520) and index.
Table of Contents
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