Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme by Asher D. Biemann (review)

Asher Biemann’s Dreaming of Michelangelo: Jewish Variations on a Modern Theme engages the intellectual history of the modern Jewish experience in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This experience, Biemann demonstrates, should be viewed as propaedeutic to engaging the history of modernity itself. To this end, he works with a wide range of Jewish thinkers, including writers of the Techiya (the renaissance of Hebrew modernism), Italian Jews, German Jews, inter alia, although Sigmund Freud, Heinrich Heine, and Hermann Cohen are his main interlocutors. Like his previous book, Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism (2009), this work is also about origins: in this case, humanity’s original image. It is also a book about dreaming, love, homecoming, and the Jewish imagination.

Biemann helps us understand what in the work of the architect of the High Renaissance Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni awakens what he terms a “Jewish imagination.” His previous book reexamined philosophies of beginnings in order to dislodge conventional diachronic notions of temporality. Societies, he argued, can be distinguished from one another by their ability to align morality with ever-new invented beginnings. Members of societies discern in the (re)creation of beginnings efforts that strengthen cultural authority and promote individual agency. In Dreaming of Michelangelo, Biemann continues to explore the balance between the freedom of the interpreter with that of the authority of tradition and culture.

A Jewish return to Italy provides fertile ground for this discussion. The pathos of the Mediterranean world, we learn in this book, is the apogee of return. A Jewish imagination operates in a world where love of Rome, of Italy, and of Michelangelo establishes aesthetics to re-imagine the “other city,” Rome, as a possible metaphoric alternative to assimilation as well as a theological “other” — idolatry (statue love) — as a more sincere form of religiosity and a deeper love for humanity.

The beauty of Italy is that life there becomes a work of art, continually recreating itself through the sensual and erotic impulse. “Michelangelo mattered,” argues Biemann, “because his art and self spoke to the Jewish condition and to the condition of humanity encompassing it” (9). The Nachleben — afterlife — of Michelangelo’s life and work engendered a portrait of an “unrequited lover,” which, for European Jewish intellectuals, personified a deep solitude and an appetence for a human response. Pointing to Gershom Scholem’s assessment that German Jews were “unhappy lovers” of Germany “allows us to think about their experience,” writes Biemann, “not through the dynamics of assimilation but as requited cultural eroticism: the desire for response and the simultaneous anxiety to be devoured by it” (49). Orienting oneself in the Diaspora required, according to Biemann, love, art and die Wahlverwandtschaften (“elective affinities”). Home is elusive, and imaginary. Love, on the other hand, is world-creating — it confronts and demands.

Biemann argues that expressions of love and dreaming within the discourse of German-Jewish thought are best understood as a form of self-empowerment. The German-Jewish love for Michelangelo and German-Jewish fantasies of Rome and of Italy, he contends, should not be confused with the intellectual pursuit of cosmopolitanism (which in itself may be a chimera). Nor should it be discerned merely as a symptom of Diasporism. It was an expression of elective affinity. It stood against feigned cultural or historical boundaries. The German-Jewish imagination declared a singular love between a lover and a beloved. This love was inclusive. The German Jews’ imagination, fantasies, and love affirmed an existential, temporal, and spatial reality: they inhabited sundry homes and spiritual homelands without renouncing their feelings of exile and longing for return. Drawing upon a theme from Biemann’s previous work, one might add that the German-Jewish imagination, like renaissances in general, continually stands against the undertaking of modernity by not only allowing itself to be transformed by it but also by resisting the Faustian bargain of persistent newness. The Jewish imagination does not...