Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith

5. “Bringing Forth Their Past Glories”

5 “Bringing Forth Their Past Glories” In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Jewish historians were fairly optimistic about the internal cultural transformation of German Jewry. During this time, Isaac Jost used the term Neuzeit to describe the period after 1750, a time he considered a “sunrise” within the historical process. Jost believed in the imminence of emancipation and cultural renewal.1 Similarly , Heinrich Graetz in his 1846 work Die Construktion der jüdischen Geschichte (The construction of Jewish history) revealed his anticipation when, in a Hegelian maneuver, he divided Jewish history into three periods, each made up of three cycles. Graetz split the past into ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history, and established a dialectical relation of succession between them. For him, Mendelssohn’s era, of which Graetz was a part, formed the last cycle in the third period. The completion of the historical formation of Judaism’s idea was, therefore, close at hand.2 In 1856, when Graetz set out to write a full-length history of the Jews, he cautiously reconceptualized Jewish history by parsing it into four epochs. In this new arrangement, the modern times formed an independent period in which the era beginning with Mendelssohn formed the first cycle. Upon the completion of his Geschichte der Juden in the 1870s, Graetz had described Jewish history until 1848. Yet Jewish history had not advanced from the first cycle of the fourth period.3 60 The same transformation can also be observed in the work of Leopold Zunz, who had originally welcomed the new age with almost messianic expectation. Zunz’s messianic rhetoric was significantly altered in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the 1848 revolution, Zunz still fervently believed in the progress of the democratic cause, and his letters once again contained references to the messianic age. His hopes were, however, dashed after the Prussian-Austrian war of 1866, during which the German liberals lost ground.4 After the war, Zunz no longer saw current history as heralding the messianic age but hoped instead that the messianic age would put an end to the horrifying developments of the nineteenth century.5 At this point, Zunz’s messianic references contain what Nahum Glatzer has rightly called an “outright apocalyptic pessimism.”6 The growing apprehension intensified in light of the delayed emancipation , the cultural and religious changes and the internal fragmentation . Zacharias Frankel captured the rapid transformation when he referred to the “stormy movements of the present” in 1852.7 The experience of the internal disintegration of the Jewish communities led Abraham Geiger to regard the present as a time of decomposition.8 This apprehension intensified during the next decades and profoundly shaped the writing and popularization of Jewish history. After the failure to achieve universal emancipation in 1848, Jewish periodicals featured reviews of the past years. While up until 1848 contemporary time progressed on a clearly charted and feverishly anticipated course, it soon became a source of confusion and frustration. The return to a policy of gradual emancipation provided only equivocal signs of progress. As late as the 1860s, the majority of Jews were still subject to some legal restrictions in the Germanic lands. Whereas Prussian reactionaries had blocked attempts at full legal emancipation, the city-state of Hamburg granted Jews full citizenship in 1860. These contradictory developments made it increasingly difficult to attribute prognostic functions to the past and present. As one reader of the Allgemeine quoted from Hamlet in 1852, “time is out of joint.”9 An article published in the Allgemeine in the 1850s titled “Das vorige und das gegenwärtige Jahrhundert” (The previous and the current centuries ) reveals that the eighteenth century functioned as the space of experience , whereas the nineteenth century marked the horizon of expectation . The article notes that “the previous century was the century of promise, and the current century is the century of fulfillment.” This hopeful comparison, however, was dimmed when the author discovered “Bringing Forth Their Past Glories” 61 that these promises were wrecked because cultural development in Germany was at a standstill, Judaism was internally fragmented, and religiosity was on the decline.10 In another leading Allgemeine article “Unser Jahrhundert” (Our century), which appeared in 1870, the eighteenth century is seen as having had “one thought, one ambition, one act,” whereas the nineteenth century is still in a process of creative fermentation .11 Moreover, many new compound nouns...