Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature by Karin Schutjer (review)

Karin Schutjer's Goethe and Judaism opens with an acknowledgment that Goethe's relationship to Judaism has been a topic of debate for centuries. Nonetheless, as she establishes, no clear consensus on Goethe's opinions of Jews or his portrayals of Jewishness has emerged. Rather than try to settle these questions, Schutjer undertakes the much more productive and interesting task of exploring Goethe's "conflicting agendas and the varied functions Judaism served in his thinking" (7). Without trying to minimize Goethe's negative utterances about and depictions of Jews and Judaism, Schutjer makes the central claim that engaging with and working through Judaism was instrumental to Goethe's conceptions of modernity. Throughout her study, she fills in this claim with evidence and arguments that make it a significant contribution to Goethe studies and to scholarship on German culture and thought around 1800 more broadly.

In the introduction, Schutjer outlines Goethe's individual encounters with the Hebrew Bible and the reception of Judaism in the cultural milieu. Schutjer highlights both the young Goethe's identification with the figure of Joseph and developments in biblical criticism that viewed the Hebrew Bible as an open-ended and multiauthored work. This hermeneutic tradition opened up a space for Goethe to use the Old Testament productively in his own thinking, although "in his bid to appropriate the Hebrew Bible for a secular, modern literature, Goethe repeatedly, pointedly strives to distinguish himself from modern Jews, to denigrate and disinherit them of their own tradition" (24). Schutjer's persuasive combination of concrete biographical evidence and general historical research provides solid ground for the more detailed textual analysis in the subsequent chapters. The first chapter expands this biographical approach, as Schutjer considers wandering as a "constitutive metaphor" (929) in Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–1833). She traces themes from Exodus, the legend of Ahasverus, Spinoza, and the Kabbalistic tradition in Goethe's autobiography to establish that while these influences are "marginal," in them Goethe "finds support for an active, open-ended conception of human destiny in which creativity, even with its divergent routes and attendant evils, could play a redemptive role" (66). Because the analysis shifts back and forth between considering Goethe's narrated life and his narrating voice, this chapter is occasionally difficult to follow, especially in comparison with the introduction, which is exceptionally clear and well written.

The second chapter investigates Goethe's "thinking about Judaism in connection with nations and nationalism" (67). Schutjer's primary argument here is that Judaism—particularly the latter books of Moses—aids Goethe in working out ideas about German identity that have to do with the relationship between the individual and the collective. She identifies two periods of engagement on this topic: the Sturm und Drang Goethe of the 1770s and the post-Revolutionary Goethe, at which point Exodus becomes associated in his thought with the French Revolution. In the next chapter, too, Schutjer traces Goethe's use of Jewish source material in his attempt to conceive of a different kind of national community, this time in the never-completed Volksbuch project of 1808 and in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821–1829). She argues that Goethe modeled both the form and content of the Volksbuch on the Hebrew Bible but that here, as in previous texts, he treats the Jewish tradition as something to be overcome and improved upon. The Wanderjahre, in her view, mark a low point in Goethe's reception of Judaism, given that his "league of emigrants" in the novel refuses to accept Jews and that the work strategically misrepresents "the profound meaning of the Jewish ban on images for semiotics, ethics, and historical consciousness" (124). But Goethe's anti-Judaism also seems to stem from an uncomfortable identification, as the depiction of "epistemological renunciation and existential orientation brings him awkwardly close to traditions within Judaism that he knew or to which he had access" (124). Schutjer provides ample...