The Price of Assimilation: Felix Mendelssohn and the Nineteenth-Century Anti-Semitic Tradition (review)

This is brave book, and a careful one. Careful, for its research is deep and punctilious. Brave, for it plunges head-first, and in a controversial manner, into the highly-charged question: how did the composer Felix Mendelssohn see his relation to Judaism?

The answer, Sposato argues, is more complex than previously realized. Recent scholarship has tended to present Mendelssohn as unashamed of his Jewish roots. Exemplars of this perspective include Eric Werner, in the 1960s, and Leon Botstein today. Sposato disagrees. He asserts—and has the evidence to back it up—that the composer's attitude to the religion of his forebears was deeply troubled. Moreover, it evolved; only near the end of his life did he find, on this subject, something approaching peace of mind.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) was the grandson of the famous Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and the son of one of Europe's most prominent bankers: Abraham Mendelssohn. The family name, his father told Felix, was therefore an inescapable advertisement of his Jewish origins. And while Felix was never circumcised, received no Jewish training, was baptized at age seven (by parental decision), was a serious student of Christian theology, and wrote a great deal of sacred Christian music, none of this prevented him from being eyed with suspicion—antisemitism was an unfortunate reality in Germany.

So it likely will come as something of a shock to most readers to learn that Mendelssohn himself indulged in antisemitism, especially early in his career. He knowingly shaped several early libretti to sacred oratorios in a manner calculated to appeal to the anti-Jewish prejudices of his time. So driven was he, it appears to have caused a rupture in his friendship with a close childhood comrade, the composer Adolph Bernhard Marx. As young men, both were interested in composing oratorios and agreed to draft libretti for each other's use: Marx for Mendelssohn's choice, St. Paul; Mendelssohn, for his friend's Moses. Yet Mendelssohn had quite a different oratorio in mind than that presented to him by Marx. He took over the libretto himself, and as work progressed, Sposato notes, "the Jewish image worsened. And while numerous opportunities arose—usually in the form of suggestions from Fürst, Marx, or Schubrig—for Mendelssohn to depict the Jews more favorably, he did not avail himself of them" (p. 97). As for the "Moses" libretto, it had such antisemitic implications that Marx, apparently, found it both abhorrent and unsalvageable. Marx, incidentally, was also a "New Christian"—yet, unlike Mendelssohn, found no need to denigrate Judaism.

Sposato points out that there were many oratorio composers of that time, Christian and New Christian alike, who were able to achieve popular acclaim without stooping to the use of antisemitic stereotypes. And—of course—the contrary: such composers as Carl Loewe and Louis Spohr never failed to present a highly negative view of the Jews. Importantly, this was never the case with the greatest of oratorio composers, Handel (1685–1759)—whom all, in one way or another, honored.

The question therefore arises: what motivated Felix Mendelssohn—who loved Handel's music and who himself was of Jewish origins and had living relatives who stood by their ancestral faith—to choose the negative path? Although, as Sposato notes, he was influenced by his father, who insisted the family keep its distance from the Jewish community, and although he was at pains to certify his Christian credentials (how better to convey his freedom from "Philo-Judaic" sentiment than to cast the Jews unfavorably?), and even though the world of German oratorio composition was competitive, and Mendelssohn highly ambitious, at bottom a deeper explanation is needed for why Mendelssohn gave himself the right to establish himself at the expense of the Jews. As the American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel has explained, "The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from [End...