Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 by Jonathan Skolnik (review)

Jonathan Skolnik’s masterful study reads German Jewish historical fiction as a popular genre of minority culture that sought to inscribe Jews into German culture and society. Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction written in German drew on the Sephardic-Jewish past and expressed a dynamic that philosopher Franz Rosenzweig dubbed “dissimilation”: an obverse movement to assimilation that affirmed a distinctive Jewish identity alongside new German identities. By reinventing Sephardic-Jewish history, Jewish writers asserted hope for integration and voiced concerns about assimilation, antisemitism, and persecution. Resonant Sephardic-Jewish themes—the vibrant Jewish culture of Islamic Spain, conversion, Inquisition, and expulsion—provided a rich source of Jewish self-understanding, through which minority cultural memory could be reinterpreted in new historical contexts.

Skolnik’s book follows on the heels of recent scholarship on Jewish historical fiction by Maurice Samuels and Jonathan Hess, but it does not retread these authors’ paths. Instead, Skolnik offers valuable insights into a literature that served (among other functions) as a corrective to the project of modern, secular Jewish historiography (Wissenschaft des Judentums). Taking cues from historians Pierre Nora and Yosef Yerushalmi, Skolnik addresses the interplay of history and memory in German Jewish culture, and this exchange’s effects on German Jewish identity construction. One of Skolnik’s significant contributions here is his demonstration of the idea that German Jewish historical fiction remained in dialogue with the majority culture, even as it asserted a unique German Jewish identity.

The book’s first chapter examines the “first modern Jewish historical novel,” Berthold Auerbach’s Spinoza (1837). Spinoza reacted against the literary figure of Ahasuerus, an enduring representation of “Jewish history” for Europeans. Auerbach has Spinoza dream about a persecuted, unenlightened, dying Ahasuerus, signaling the triumph of secularization and rationalism embodied by the philosopher. However, the novel also consciously confronts the challenge secularization posed to Judaism and Jewish identity. Auerbach situates his novel between the radical assimilationism of Karl Gutzkow and the Spinoza controversy of the 1780s, in which Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn became embroiled. By identifying Spinoza as the precursor to Mendelssohn’s Enlightenment thought, Auerbach perpetuates an ideology of Jewish emancipation by claiming Spinoza for Jewish history. Spinoza thus strives to insert minority culture, which secularization threatens to marginalize, into the national narrative of German literary history. Historical fiction would serve thereafter as a model for Jewish writers concerned with Jews’ integration as Jews into German culture.

In his second chapter, Skolnik interprets Heinrich Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840) both as a text that posits secular literature as a counterweight to the demythologizing tendencies of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, and as a modern type of Jewish cultural memory. Skolnik’s compelling analysis of the “Haggadah” motif illustrates the critical role Heine envisioned for narrative in negotiating the divide between Jewish collective memory and nineteenth-century historicism. In his “secularized Haggadah” modeled on Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott, Heine revives the Sephardic-Jewish thinker, Don Isaac Abarbanel, an ambivalent figure endowed with the cultural integration of that historical epoch, and the knowledge of how fleeting that achievement was. German Jewish writers of historical fiction learned from Heine to appropriate Abarbanel as a vehicle for expressing a range of attitudes toward the projects of (Jewish) integration and modernization.

Chapter 3 treats five nineteenth-century historical novels addressed to a German Jewish public sphere, which had arisen from German Jews’ acculturation and their thriving print culture. Skolnik maintains that this minority literature sought to create a normative, stable Jewish identity compatible with the project of integration. Jewish historical fiction achieved this didactic aim through allusions to German “high” culture, often works by Goethe and Lessing. Skolnik also makes a cogent argument here for the inadequacy of existing theories of minority culture in analyzing German Jewish literature; rather than attempting to subvert the project of national identity—a strategy germane to other minority cultures—German Jewish...