Deutsche-jüdische Symbiose—oder Die mißglückte Emanzipation (review)

144 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 Although Jewish Nietzscheanism may have been rather limited, Nietzscheans ofJewish heritage were at least as abundant as their Christian counterparts. Robert C. Holub Department of German University of California at Berkeley Deutsche-jiidische Symbiose-oder Die mi6g1iickte Emanzipation, by Julius H. Schoeps. Berlin: Philo, 1996. 418 pp. OM 64.00. This is not a monograph but a collection of Schoeps's essays about German-Jewish relations from 1750 to the present. While any such collection must inevitably lack the force ofa more clearly focused book-length study, the author has nevertheless attempted to impose a sort ofunity on these variegated studies. Schoeps thus identifies a single conviction shaping his research-namely, the beliefthat"Germans and Jews on German territory, especially in the last three hundred years, have had a common history" (p. 9). Moreover, he has organized his pieces into three categories, the first dealing with Jewish emancipation, the secondwith German antisemitism, andthe third with Zionism. These themes, he believes, exist in a dialectical relationship with one another, with "emancipation as thesis, modem antisemitism as antithesis, and Zionism as synthesis" (p. 11). Unfortunately, Schoeps's Zionist dialectic of failed emancipation contradicts his hope for a common German-Jewish history which would renew the Deutschejiidische Symbiose under a different name. After all, it is only from a Jewish (rather than a German) perspective that Zionism can be understood as a fmal synthesis ofopposing forces. Schoeps's collection is thus ultimately less about any attempted symbiosis between Germans and Jews than about the failure of Jewish emancipation itself. That emancipation, Schoeps suggests, was conditional upon the willingness of German Jews to give up the particular rituals which set them apart, and embrace what amounted to a "Christianity without Christ" (p. 39). In this context, Reform Judaism was invented as a kind of Jewish "Church" hardly distinguishable from the Protestant denominations (pp. 80-81). During the Frankfurt Assembly, its temporary Jewish vicepresident Gabriel Riesser thus saw Judaism as merely one more German "confession," and assimilation as just another aspect of the larger process of national consolidation around the Prussian state (pp. 110, 119). The failure ofthe Revolution of 1848 made Jewish integration more problematic. Conservative reactionaries joined nationalist revolutionaries in denouncing the project of conversion and demanding instead the long-delayed unification of Germans in opposition to the Jews. A key chapter, "The Flight into Hate," thus carefully delineates the well-known transmutation of Judeophobia into antisemitism, tracing the way in Book Reviews 145 which the image of the Jewish parasite was superimposed on the older picture of the demon Jew. Richard Wagner played a particular role in that transformation by denouncing even converted Jewish artists for allegedly poisoning German culture with their alien spirit (pp. 181-82). Adumbrating Hitler, Wagner vilified the Jews for their technically proficient but ultimately sterile mastery of German forms. Nor was it any accident that the sage ofBeyreuth first published his essay on "Judaism in Music" only a year after the failure at Frankfurt. It was just these increasingly shrill attacks, Schoeps believes, that caused the Zionist seed to finally germinate. To be sure, he concedes that Zionism arose as a variant of German nationalism. But by including an essay delineating the effect of Dreyfus's ceremonial degradation on Theodor Herzl's tum to Zionism, Schpeps ultimately implies that the triumph of the Zionist idea cannot be found within the German cultural sphere alone (pp. 345-346). It is thus precisely here that the book-as a book-goes awry. However interesting the individual essays, any coherent study of the origins of Zionism cannot limit itself to German conditions. Conversely, if this volume is supposed to be about the failure of Jewish assimilation in Germany (a very different topic altogether), it probably should not have ended with a discussion of the Zionists. This is because most German Jews not only wanted to remain Germans, but would have done so but for the improbable rise ofNational Socialism. It thus seems to me (if not to commentators like Goldhagen) that the failure of emancipation was far from inevitable. The very fact that Prussiaand its tradition ofGerman-Jewish symbiosis ruled until 1933...