Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power and Community (review)

Each term in the title of this book brings up questions that are vital to the nature of Dean Bell's study. These concerns have to do with the substance of the people, places, events and ideas that are synthesised into this very brief book. For while it is brief, it is no introductory survey, nor is it an easy textbook for undergraduate classes. Instead, it is a very sophisticated, terse, and therefore necessarily complex book best suited to readers already well-versed in European and Jewish history and cultures.

In the first instance, by using the buzz word 'identity' in regard to Jews, Bell elides the central concern actually manifested: historiography. For the question with which he is concerned, is not so much who and what the Jews thought they were in relation to the other peoples of central Europe amongst whom they found themselves. Instead, the focus here is how the Jews negotiated these peoples' emerging sense of national history, in which they were forced to play a role, not always of their own choosing, let alone of their own understanding. In addition, rather than only being about Ashkenazim, that is, Yiddish-speakers within a world of Yiddishkeyt, as one would expect if identity was defined by geography and cultural dominance, Bell also refers to Sephardim, who had their own synagogues, language, customs and sense of history. These people had been arriving in Germanic-speaking cities since the time of the great Expulsion from Spain in 1492. Only once, in passing, on the next to last page of his Conclusion, does Bell remark that among other things, the German Jews had to watch their behinds for fear that their own culture and history would be overtaken by Polish Jewry.

In the second instance, by speaking of Early Modern Germany in his main title the author begs three further questions. (1) Although in the course of the following chapters, Bell does speak regularly of both 'Reformation and reformations', and occasionally of 'Renaissance' and 'late medieval times', his designation of 'Early Modern' signals a politically correct position, that is really an ideological assertion. He is arguing that there is neither a grand narrative for Europe or the world, certainly not an orderly passage through stages of progressive intellectual and aesthetic development, and consequently no heroic actors, events, or truths to be described, analysed and praised. (2) As for the use of Germany, it seems to contradict the previous comments, insofar as it is, at best, a geographical term, probably better an indication of linguistic and cultural spread, not at all the name of a political entity or nationality. Bell deals with Swiss, Danish, Czech and Dutch towns as well as those now encompassed by the Federal Republic of Germany. (3) The modernity referred to, as already suggested, hardly fits within a strict chronological scheme of forward motion, since neither Jews nor Christians were in agreement about what periodisation should be used, nor where and when to place intersections of their own specific narrative histories, destined turning points, and points of viewing the other.

Then we come to the three words that comprise the subtitle to this book. While they are essentially faddish indicators of popular concern for a postmodernist perspective on the world, they are also nevertheless key concepts in the organisation of Bell's argument. There is one exception, however. What is at stake, as we said above, is historiography, and therefore the absence of the word 'history' strikes one as significant. It is there in the title to the first chapter 'Memory, History and Jewish Identity' and then again in Chapter 5 'Politics, Polemics, and History: Assessing Jewish Identity'. Bell is concerned with how Jews write about their pasts, how they conceive of the past in relation to the times in which they and other peoples have shared experiences, those in which they travelled down separate tracks, and how, if at...