German and Hebrew: Histories of a Conversation

The papers brought together in this special issue provide some contours for an as yet to be written history of the literary and cultural intersections of two languages, German and Hebrew. Neither this brief introduction nor the articles that follow are intended to provide a comprehensive picture of this fascinating history, but rather to indicate the wealth of the scholarship that exists in this field, while pointing out that it remains elusive as a cohesive field in its own right. Thus, this issue of Prooftexts aims to serve as a provocation for further work that will promote our understanding of German–Hebrew encounters, literary transfers, and cultural dialogues. This interlinguistic conversation goes at least as far back as Moses Mendelssohn’s bilingual authorship and translation work in the late eighteenth century. Mendelssohn’s famous Bible translation—its Hochdeutsch written out in Hebrew characters so as to be accessible to a broad public of Jewish readers—can be seen not only as the initiation of a process of linguistic assimilation of Jews in German, but also as an embodiment of the linguistic hybrids that are created in the encounter between the two languages.¹ The history that unfolds from this inaugural publication often follows in Mendelssohn’s footsteps and involves both translation and language-mixture. It provides us with a fascinating prism through which to refract Jewish cultural and literary history, tying together different moments and questions in new and often unexpected ways.

Mendelssohn’s descendants in the Jewish Enlightenment continued throughout the nineteenth century to inhabit a cultural space deeply informed by the two languages. In German, they promoted a new “Wissenschaft des Judentum,” while Hebrew language publications such as Ha-Me’asef were harbingers of a Hebrew Republic of letters that would for many decades be oriented in relation to the German world.² This volume looks to the nineteenth century with Noam Pines’s reading of Heinrich Heine, an author who playfully confronted German and Hebrew in his verse.

In the first half of the twentieth century, German-speaking cities such as Berlin, Heidelberg, and Vienna were home—for longer or briefer periods of time—to some of the most important Hebrew writers of the time, including M. Y. Berdyczewsky, S. Y. Agnon, Ÿ. N. Bialik, S. Tschernichowsky, Leah Goldberg, Avraham Ben-Yitzÿak, David Vogel, Uri-Tsvi Grinberg. Some of them, such as Berdyczewsky, Ben-Yitzÿak, and Vogel, even explored the possibility of writing in German or of translating their own work into German. Others, such as Agnon and Goldberg, found in interwar Germany a fertile topic for their fiction. The case of Agnon is the topic of Maya Barzilai’s contribution to this issue, “S. Y. Agnon’s German Consecration and the ‘Miracle’ of Hebrew Letters.” At the same time, German Jewish authors such as Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Franz Kafka all participated, in different ways, in a burgeoning German Jewish Hebraism, taking more or less practical steps to learn the language, translating from it, and imagining the Hebrew land. Both of these contexts have been studied extensively in the work of Michael Brenner and are further illuminated in his essay, “Between Triumph and Tragedy: The Use and Misuse of Hebrew in Germany from Mendelssohn to Eichmann.”³

As Brenner’s title intimates, this rich cultural and literary exchange was brought to an abrupt end by the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The radical break at the heart of the twentieth century casts a difficult shadow on any talk of German–Hebrew bilingualism and overshadows the perception of a productive engagement of Hebrew authors with the German cultural realm. In the wake of the Holocaust, German and Hebrew may intuitively seem to inhabit mutually repellent magnetic fields. The notion that the two could cohabit a cultural space, coexist in a single mind, or even speak simultaneously within one literary text may seem hard to fathom. And yet the experiences of exile, displacement, and loss are often reflected in linguistic and literary hybrids that mix the two languages, such as Paul Celan...