Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness (review)

Book Reviews 125 achievements but, on the other, led to Jews' leaving their faith in one way or another. The irony was that to antisemites in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries it made little difference whether Jews attended synagogue or not. Gay is concerned less with questions of continuity and discontinuity than with presenting a mosaic illustrating the vicissitudes of German Jews. They suffered persecution, yet they also enjoyed both material and cultural success. The benefit of this portrait is that it provides readers a long-term look at an amazingly vibrant community. While it does not come to any striking conclusions, the book is immensely valuable as both a collection of sources and an informational resource. A more extensive bibliography would be helpful, but this handsomely published tome is a must for all students of either German or Jewish history. Glenn R. Sharfman Hiram College Reinscribing Moses: Heine, Kafka, Freud, and Schoenberg in a European Wilderness, byBlumaGoldstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 218 pp. $32.50. Since the publication of Sol Uptzin's seminal study Germany's Stepchildren 50 years ago, numerous books and articles have attempted to elucidate the tragic duality of Jewish writers and thinkers in Germanspeaking countries. To the growing number of such studies Bluma Goldstein, a professor of German literature at the University of California in Berkeley, has now contributed a cogently argued and stimulating work of mature scholarship that is likely to be of wide appeal, for it offers new insights into the identity problems of German and Austrian Jews in the period of emancipation. Goldstein's four subjects were all marginal Jews (and in two cases converts to Christianity) who regarded themselves as Europeans but experienced so much non-acceptance and hostility that they felt impelled to "inscribe the founder ofthe nation ofIsrael into the documents of their German culture," to integrate a Jewish tradition of 6000 years into the 2000-year-old Christian tradition, thus affirming a dual conception of history and exemplifYing both a continued commitment to the dominant culture and a rueful return to Judaism. In accordance with their different personalities and aspirations these four men concerned themselves with Moses, Moses figures, or the Mosaic tradition as cultural metaphors 126 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 relatively late in their careers. To Heinrich Heine, Moses was a great socialist who welded an inchoate mass into a great nation; Kafka viewed himself as a desert wanderer still short of liberation and redemption but on the road to a purer existence; Freud saw himself as a prophet leading people out of bondage through the science of psychoanalysis; and Arnold Schoenberg shared with Moses the difficulty of delivering a great and ennobling spiritual message. Skillfully moving back and forth between texts and contexts, Goldstein presents a typology of tensions and dichotomies: Moses as the quintessential diaspora Jew and Moses as the creator of the nation Israel; Moses as the liberator and universal lawgiver and Moses the unassimilable Jew; Moses as a remarkable coalescence of individual fulfillment and accomplishment and Moses the solitary and isolated figure. Heine invoked Moses in his Ludwig Borne: A Memorial (1839-40) and his Confessions (1854). His earlier view of Moses as a constraining figure and enemy of the revolution gave way to a vision of "Moshe Rabenu" as a great libertarian emancipator and social reformer (which is how Heine viewed himself). As he was wasting away in his "mattress grave," Heine, having abandoned Hellenism and sensuality, increasingly turned to the Hebrew Bible. Franz Kafka referred to Moses mostly in his post-1920 diaries and his conversations with Gustav Janouch. He was less concerned with the biblical figure than with a living cultural influence and touchstone for humane conduct. Kafka sometimes seemed to regard himself as fated to live in a wilderness, but the idea of the lawgiver provided a connection between the past and the present as well as an affirmation of Jewish life and peoplehood in the diaspora. In "From Rome to Egypt: Freud's Mosaic Transformations" Goldstein discusses Freud's early preoccupation with Rome (which he abhorred) and Hannibal (whom he admired). Freud first viewed Michelangelo's statue of Moses in 1901, and his...