Das andere Blut: Gemeinschaft im deutsch-jüdischen Schreiben 1830-1930 by Caspar Battegay (review)

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of one of the most fraught tropes of German Jewish culture: blood. Between 1830 and 1930, a new racial anti-Semitism developed, and "blood" became the marker of a supposedly indelible Jewish difference, a code word that served to exclude Jews from communities imagined as racially homogeneous. The word had other problematic connotations as well. It recalled, for instance, the medieval blood libels, which during the nineteenth century were revived in several ritual murder accusations against Jews. How could German Jews possibly use the word in their own reflections on the nature and language of community? The purpose of Das andere Blut is to show that they did so, and to ask why and how they did so. Caspar Battegay reconstructs the varied and complex ways in which secular German Jewish writers invoked blood to rethink the grounds of community. While his selection of authors is perhaps unsurprising - he covers canonical figures ranging from Heine to Hess, Nordau, and Buber and to Rosenzweig and Kafka - these choices make sense for this project and, moreover, allow for an interdisciplinary approach. By juxtaposing literary, political, and philosophical texts, Battegay shows how blood functions as a trope across the genres, disclosing a conceptual history that sheds new light on German Jewish thought and writing.

Battegay's central thesis is that tropes of blood help writers negotiate the tension between community formation (Vergemeinschaftung) and isolation (Vereinzelung). The former is least important for Heinrich Heine, whose ironic, even caricature-like references to Christian and Jewish traditions drain blood of all transcendence, including its redemptive power and symbolic function in the Eucharist. Battegay provocatively suggests that Heine's insistence on radical isolation and Gemeinschaftslosigkeit, illustrated by the blood that flows without a reason, gave crucial impulses to Zionist thought. Heine's works inspired, for instance, the socialist and proto-Zionist Moses Hess, who compares the circulation of money to the spilling of blood. Both are metaphors of bad community formation against which Hess conjures the organic wholeness of natural blood circulation and, in Rome and Jerusalem, of Jewish family life. In this section, Battegay also persuasively draws on recent theory, especially Alain Badiou's and Giorgio Agamben's reinterpretations of Pauline theology, to argue for the radical, messianic character of Hess's thought. Battegay offers illuminating explanations as to why tropes of blood figure more prominently in cultural than in political Zionism. For the political Zionist Max Nordau, blood was too static and essentializing a metaphor. Instead, he seized on the image of the "muscle-Jew" to explain how the individual Jew could strengthen himself (and in turn his community) through his own efforts. In contrast, the cultural Zionist Martin Buber enthusiastically took up Hess's language of "blood," in part because the semantic vagueness of the term allowed him to posit a mysterious inner force holding Jews together. Among the strengths of this section is the great philological care with which Battegay attends to the rhetorical dimension of Buber's texts, the way in which their language evokes blood as sound and sensation.

In the last chapters of the book, Battegay turns to two particularly difficult and enigmatic writers, Franz Rosenzweig and Franz Kafka, whom he folds into his larger narrative without reducing the complexity of their texts. He reconstructs Rosenzweig's early critique of Buber's rhetoric of blood - and of any racial definition of Jews and Judaism - and his subsequent return to this rhetoric in The Star of Redemption. As Battegay persuasively argues, it is only through reference to the concept of revelation - understood as a linguistic event - that we can make sense of Rosenzweig's much-discussed idea of a Jewish "blood community." Kafka takes all of these ideas apart while remaining indebted to them. Battegay's overall argument about Kafka's deconstructive bent resonates with much recent Kafka scholarship. Yet his analysis...