The Lost Children of German-Jewish Culture

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 1994

1992

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 1991

The chapters in this volume set out in a variety of directions, collectively giving voice to a wide spectrum of specific interests and innovative methodologies. Taken together, they represent a nuanced image of German-Jewish studies as the field is developing today: encompassing multiple disciplines that range from history to literature, philosophy, and beyond. I shall not duplicate the editors' introduction that describes the chapters of the rising scholars who appear here. Rather, I shall step back from the contributors' individual projects in order to present a personal analysis of the nature of the field as a whole and to make some suggestions for future concentration. 1 When I began to study the history of the German Jews fully sixty years ago, Jewish and German were understood as distinct markers of identity, and I was concerned with showing how inherited Jewish identifications diminished to make room for German ones. I knew that in the process of its diminution the Jewish component would assume new forms in relation to the religious heritage both through distancing from earlier attachments and longings as well as through application of critical approaches, learned from the university, to Jewish texts and traditions. At the same time, conflicting values were being absorbed from the non-Jewish environment. I also recognized that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, German intellectuals were shifting from the Enlightenment's reliance on philosophical thought to a fervent attachment to Romanticism with its preference for historical truth over abstract reason. However, I did not proceed to trace the interaction of the two components, Jewish and German, beyond the period when these two elements of the German Jews' identity first confronted each other. Nor did I fully realize the extent of the internal dynamism of the two identities. Recent scholarship has justifiably argued against understanding "Jewish" and "German" as representing a fixed binary. Rather, both elements of the relationship are now understood to be unstable. Given our current understanding, I would therefore like to examine here the relationship between Jewish and German as we might