Volk oder Religion? Die Entstehung moderner jüdischer Ethnizität in Frankreich und Deutschland 1782–1848 by Philip Lenhard (review)

The continued relevance of the term “ethnicity” in the humanities—with all of its political implications—makes Philip Lenhard’s new book on conceptions of Jewish ethnicity in France and Germany from 1782 to 1848 a timely contribution. Volk oder Religion? assiduously analyzes the various and often competing self-understandings of Jewish communities in the regions east and west of the Rhine, situating his analysis against the Enlightenment, romanticism, and the Vormärz period before 1848. Among the many accomplishments of the book is the way it disrupts teleological readings of Jewish modernity in the European context. Indeed, one of its polemical thrusts is its critique of recent historiographies that appear to be influenced by the political agenda of their authors. Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (2010), for example, regards the notion of a Jewish “Volk” as a late nineteenth-century invention that opposed Judaism’s “original” self-definition as a religious community (21). That interpretation may accord with Sand’s critique of contemporary Zionism, but it overlooks, for Lenhard, crucial facts. By holding a magnifying glass up to key moments and figures in French- and German-Jewish history, Lenhard shows how the story is, as usual, more complicated.

Volk oder Religion? is, above all, a work of intellectual history. Lenhard generally proceeds by initially giving brief introductions to rabbis, theologians, writers, or philosophers; and then by discussing central passages in their landmark works. Lenhard examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century self-conceptions of Judaism alongside the developing shape of French and German antisemitism before and just after the French Revolution. The political emancipation of the Jews and the decline of the ancien régime opened up new questions about the role of Judaism within the budding nation-state: how and why, Lenhard asks, did more reform-minded Prussian Jews ultimately come to see themselves as “Prussian citizens of the Jewish faith” (113)? Lenhard disputes the premise that the belief in a unitary Jewish people with a common ethnic ancestry had been held for centuries. To demonstrate this claim, he offers a genealogical history of the cluster of terms under scrutiny—Volk, the Hebrew am, the Greek ethnos, and so on—thereby showing how the definition of “ethnicity” itself has been anything but uniform across time and space. Lenhard then shows how the Enlightenment-inspired movement to translate Judaism into a mere community of faith (Glaubensgemeinschaft) beyond notions of ancestry (Abstammung) encountered strong opposition; here the contributions of Jewish philosophes of the Enlightenment (maskilim), specifically Moses Mendelssohn’s notion of a “priestly nation” (125), are central, as is the more radical thought of David Friedländer.

Lenhard also looks at representatives of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism such as Israel Deutsch, Samson Rafael Hirsch, and Simon Bloch. He shows how romantic conceptions of an original Judaism were often summoned as a way to both reassert a more authentic vision of Judaism and to guard against the perceived negative influences of modernity on the various Jewish communities these figures represented. Lenhard concludes that, in virtually all of these models, some notion of Jewish ethnicity played an important role. During the years prior to the failed revolutions of 1848, philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon had a profound influence on a number of Jewish thinkers. Lenhard devotes special attention to the ways in which the dialectic between the particular and the universal was being negotiated in the writings of many Jewish Hegelians, primarily among those affiliated with the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden such as Eduard Gans and Moses Moser but also in the work of the revolutionary Moses Hess. Lenhard emphasizes how many of these Jewish Hegelians deployed the biological metaphors common in Hegel’s work in order to describe different ways in which Judaism could be conceived as...