Beyond Dialogue: New Scholarship in German-Jewish Studies

Whether there ever was a German-Jewish dialogue remains an important question, as evidenced by recent works in German-Jewish intellectual history and cultural studies, which reaffirm the question in the very act of dancing around it. Navigating between claims that a dialogue did exist (as a historical fact) and also never existed (as an undeniable outcome of the extermination of one of the supposed parties to that dialogue), these works point out a range of new directions that provides a vista on the field of German-Jewish studies today.

Two books approach the German-Jewish experience from philosophical perspectives, with diametrically opposite results. Paul Mendes-Flohr's German Jews: A Dual Identity traces the evolution of the German-Jewish idea in the work of major thinkers: Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Strauss, Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. The trajectory reveals that despite manifold differences in their understanding of the two components, "German" and "Jewish," and even more striking disagreements about the "and" that links them, the inner commitments of the German Jews—to humanistic culture, to history, and to spiritual and intellectual integrity—remained constant. In opposition to Mendes-Flohr (and to the general consensus), Jeffrey S. Librett's The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond opens by asserting that "there never was a dialogue between Jews and Germans" (xvi)—when dialogue is understood as "symmetrical exchange of expressions of intention between dyadic partners, to the end of mutual and nonviolent understanding." The key term in Librett's enterprise is "rhetoric"; by analyzing the rhetorical premises of Jewish-Christian dialogue from the Reformation onward, Librett attempts to prove that, when seen from the vantage point of the insiders, the German-Jewish dialogue was not simply an illusion, but an ontological impossibility.

The Jewish presence in literature during the nineteenth century, a period in which Jews first gained entrée into bourgeois society and culture, is explored in two other studies. Florian Krobb's Selbstdarstellungen (Self-Presentations) reconceptualizes the history of prose writing by German Jews by analyzing the three most important prose genres employed during these years—historical novel, ghetto tale, and Zeitroman (roman à clef )—and exploring the sociological function of each within both the mainstream and the Jewish world. Irving Massey's study of philosemitism surveys works of the same period by non-Jewish writers in which positive Jewish characters and themes appear. By attempting to correct a perceived overattention to antisemitism, and by speculating about his topic and methodology from several vantage points, Massey aims for a more enlightened, and a more Jewish, perspective on the German-Jewish dialogue.

Two other works combine intellectual and cultural history to explore their subject matter. In a study that extends from the Enlightenment through the late nineteenth century, Jeffrey Grossman's The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany "seeks to trace the genealogy of the image of Yiddish across a range of texts, genres, institutions and disciplines" (3); Yiddish becomes a figure for the weakest link in the German-Jewish connection, where the (mostly negative) response to Yiddish in German and German-Jewish texts signifies the prejudices and misunderstandings accorded Jews in general. Noah Isenberg's Between Redemption and Doom investigates "the strains of German-Jewish modernism" by juxtaposing...