Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt and the Poetics of Jewish Fiction by David Gantt Gurley (review)

In this monograph, David Gantt Gurley, Associate Professor of Scandinavian and Director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Jewish Studies at the University of Oregon, aims to expand the commonly accepted view of the Danish Golden Age to encompass a figure outside the ranks of the Danish Lutheran elites, ranging from Adam Oehlenschläger and Johan Ludvig Heiberg to Søren Kierkegaard, to whom credit for the literary triumphs of the age is usually given. The Danish Jewish author Meïr Aaron Goldschmidt, Gurley notes, "was neither an aristocrat nor a member of the elite, but he was a brilliant writer whose art radiated out of little Denmark to the streets of London, the salons of Paris, and the enclaves of Vienna and Berlin" (p. 2). In Gurley's view, Goldschmidt's importance as a writer derives to a large extent from his peripheral position "on a double boundary, so to speak: the cartographic line that has been drawn between continental Europe and Scandinavia since medieval times, and the ethnographic line that runs between the dream of a homogenous Protestant Europe and an enlightened minority's rational call for freedom and equality" (p. 3). This positionality, as a Danish Jew, informs both the creation and reception of Goldschmidt's literary oeuvre, which was produced almost exclusively in Danish for a non-Jewish audience but which occupies itself primarily with questions of Jewish heritage and culture in relation to Christian Europe.

Citing Goldschmidt's innovative contributions to both Jewish and Danish literature, Gurley laments Goldschmidt's exclusion from both the global literary canon and Jewish literary history. While he notes that Goldschmidt is celebrated in Danish scholarship as one of the greatest Danish national writers of the 1860s, he cautions that this praise is both too narrow, "carefully situated . . . between the death of Kierkegaard in the 1850s and the rise of the Brandes brothers in the 1870s" (p. 8), and too shallow—uncontested and therefore true by default or concession—to convey the complexity of Goldschmidt's authorship, in particular his engagement with his Jewish heritage. Gurley's book addresses this neglect by focusing on Goldschmidt as a Jewish writer, offering "an alternative to the nationalistic discourse so prevalent in the [Danish] scholarship," and situating Goldschmidt within a broader context of European Jewish literary trends, "part of a larger, global continuum of Jewish culture and storytelling . . . [which] reveals even more clearly the richness of his poetical art" (p. 9). Gurley credits Goldschmidt with both writing the first Jewish novel in a European language, making him one of the fathers of modern Jewish literature, and anticipating the iconoclastic narrative strategies of modernism.

Through close readings of several of Goldschmidt's seminal texts, Gurley highlights the specifically Jewish elements of Goldschmidt's writing and connects him to various romantic and modernist writers. After a prologue in which he lays out the dissimilarity from both Danish and Jewish culture that characterized Goldschmidt's life and career, the first chapter of the book deals with Goldschmidt's youth and early adulthood as a conflicted Jew in a Denmark undergoing significant political and social transformations. This context, in particular the ways in which Goldschmidt's involvement with the Danish national liberal movement intersected with his personal life, sets the stage for Goldschmidt's literary engagement with Jewishness over the rest of his career. In chapter 2, Gurley analyzes Goldschmidt's employment of midrashic strategies in the novel En Jøde (1845; A Jew), which allows him to layer interpretations and nuances within his texts, blurring the boundary between text and commentary. In this regard, Gurley argues, Goldschmidt anticipates Franz Kafka's iconoclastic "ab-use" of scripture, or reading against the grain. He also explores how Goldschmidt's work illustrates the Coleridgean romantic term "esemplastic" (the ability to mold diverse ideas or things into unity). In the third chapter, Gurley lays out Goldschmidt's "secular use...