Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin and Sander L. Gilman (review)

As the authors of this study, two prominent cultural historians and scholars of literature, Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman, maintain, the uses and assessments of the term cosmopolitanism have undergone significant changes over time in the context of different ideologies and movements. Idealized during the Enlightenment, the ideals of universal humanity, brotherhood of men, or world citizenship were increasingly drawn into question with the rising acceptance of national and racist paradigms. Unsurprisingly, the key representatives of pre-Nazi cosmopolitanism featured in this study, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, were sons of the multinational Habsburg Empire, and like Lion Feuchtwanger, a native of Munich, they were Jewish. In recent critical debates cosmopolitanism has been revisited in the realization that the preferred terms of the late twentieth century, multiculturalism, internationalism, and transculturalism, failed to address the entire spectrum of cosmopolitanism. In establishing the range of these and related terminologies, Gelbin and Gilman trace cosmopolitanism from its Greek origins through the centuries to differentiate it from other key concepts of modern and postmodern discussi ons on exile, migration, and "nomadism." In the course of their undertaking, a panorama of literary authors and critics, philosophers, and historians unfolds, from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Immanuel Kant to George Mosse, Wladimir Kaminer, and Lena Gorelik. By establishing links between this plethora of authors and associating them with expressions of cosmopolitanism, by critically examining the variety of these European cosmopolitanisms, the book represents a major scholarly contribution and a platform for further study.

The word cosmopolitanisms in the title points at the complexities of the subject matter and the conceptual layers evoke notions of cultural identity and positionality. These complexities include the divergent histories of post-Enlightenment urban cultures, notably Vienna, Berlin, and Prague. In the outset, Gelbin and Gilman review past and present controversies on cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitans in different cultural spheres and eras. Underlying their story of cosmopolitanisms, cultural historical narratives are established that support the study's internal structure. Generally, Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews follows chronological lines with special emphases placed at important historical junctures, most prominently the time of the First World War and the interwar period in whose setting the rise of extreme nationalism, peace movements, and a politicized cosmopolitanism emerged in tandem with the economic and ideological struggles of the 1920s and 1930s. Gelbin and Gilman furthermore examine issues of internal and external positioning and identification that inform the ambivalent concept of Jewish cosmopolitanism in non-Jewish writing, and, conversely, cosmopolitan mobility as an inherent organizational principle in the Jewish imaginary in response to pressures and constraints emanating from the dominant societies. The study furthermore examines exemplary historical and contemporary texts in detail, testing the quality and validity of concepts of cosmopolitanisms and delineating conditions that produce varieties of cosmopolitan expression.

Rather than offering handy definitions of cosmopolitanism (cosmopolitanisms), the book allows an understanding of these phenomena to arise from a judicious selection of literature and critical works. Thus, Gelbin and Gilman shed light on the evolution of the controversial concept of Jewish cosmopolitanism by non-Jews from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Pertinent texts and theories are presented through the lenses of cultural theory, history, and literary studies in a multileveled approach that provides Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews with the very sense of mobility the subject matter implies—the approach of the study reproduces the fluctuations of the cosmopolitanisms it discusses.

Gelbin's and Gilman's intellectual interlocutors and witnesses include historical giants such as Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann as well as lesser-known figures such as Ephraim Kuh and Berthold Auerbach. Their study also dialogues with modernist and postmodernist thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Edward Said and contemporary authors whose critical insights validate the need for renewed attention to the concept of cosmopolitanism. Gelbin's and Gilman's critical readings of literary texts, contextualized with material from other disciplines, proceed in...