"I am a memory come alive": Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of German Jewish Thought in America

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 123–148 ‘‘I am a memory come alive’’ Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of German Jewish Thought in America EUGENE R . SHEPPARD AT THE CENTENARY ANNIVERSARY of Nahum Glatzer’s birth (1903– 1990), one cannot help but be struck by the enormous contribution he has made to the field of Jewish studies.1 As a teacher, mostly at Brandeis University (1950–1973), he attracted and trained a generation and a half of Jewish studies scholars. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Michael Fishbane, Arthur Green, and Everett Fox are just some of the more prominent figures who have studied under Glatzer during the last forty years. These figures were drawn to Glatzer as a teacher who possessed an intimate command of Jewish sources and thinkers, ranging from the Bible to Franz Rosenzweig .2 Glatzer’s portraits of the cultural giants of interwar Central European Jewry in particular—Rosenzweig, Kafka, Agnon, and Buber, to name just a few—to an English-reading audience in the United States still function as the prism through which many readers have come to appreciate the rich legacy of a pre-Holocaust European Jewish voice. While Glatzer was recognized at an early age as having an unusual command of Jewish texts, at no point in his pre–World War II career was he considered among the most powerful or original thinkers in Jewish stud1 . This essay was inspired by a series of conversations I had with my teacher and former colleague Arnold Band. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Graduate and Faculty Colloquium in Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, October 24, 2002, and then at the Association for Jewish Studies conference on December 18, 2002. I thank the participants of both forums for their valuable insights and criticisms. I also thank Sylvia Fuks Fried, Ora Band, Courtney Booker, Susan Cho, and David Myers for their helpful suggestions. 2. There are several published accounts of Glatzer as a teacher. See, for example , the introduction to Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday by his Students, ed. M. Fishbane and P. R. Mendes-Flohr (Leiden, 1975). The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 124 JQR 94:1 (2004) ies. Yet, Glatzer’s portrait of Franz Rosenzweig in particular was so successful in capturing the imagination of American Jews, and later, German Christians and Israelis, that this little-known figure has become one of the two German Jewish philosophers most recognizable to an educated American Jewish audience, the other being Martin Buber. It is time to examine more carefully Nahum Glatzer’s scholarship in order to assess its impact in the field of Jewish studies.3 In particular, we will investigate three overlapping literary genres of Glatzer’s work: biography, textual interpretation, and above all anthology. To argue that the decisive characteristics of a scholar’s career can be located in her or his anthological work—a genre that would seem merely to gather and collect the voices of others—may strike us as counterintuitive. But Glatzer ’s manifold efforts as an anthologist reveal a distinctive persona and legacy. This article analyzes his work through the optic concept that best describes Glatzer’s anthological craft: a prism. A prism refracts and bends a ray of light as it passes from one medium to another. Glatzer’s prismatic approach to Jewish studies became most clearly operative when he discussed a recurring moment in the history of Jewish thought: the point at which a notable Jewish figure steps back from the precipice of abandoning Judaism. I now turn to the task of recapturing some key characteristics of the early career of this intriguing figure. A BRIEF SKETCH OF GLATZER’S EARLY CAREER Norbert Glatzer was born on March 23, 1903, in Lemberg, Galicia. In 1915, Glatzer’s family became part of the exodus of Jews from Galicia to German-speaking areas that took place in the years surrounding World War I and settled in Tetschen...