Hannah Arendt remembered the public declaration of a highly cultivated German Jew who had only just crossed the Rhine in the company of his fellow listeners: “We were good Germans in Germany, and so we shall be good Frenchmen in France.” He was warmly applauded by the packed hall. Arendt recalled it, and remarked: no one laughed. But why should they have laughed? The speaker quoted by Arendt was not joking, and even had he been, his companions in fate, crammed into the auditorium, would not have noticed. Neither he nor the listeners who thought as he did were truly aware of the fathomless void of that formulation; what is more, what it pointed to was, for them, no laughing matter but a question of life and death. That they had no wish to laugh, or had perhaps forgotten how to laugh, was the last triumph of Europe’s great leap into the continent of nations.
At the far end of that leap, the hope was that the preposterous hodgepodge of places, languages, histories, calendars, and customs would dissolve once and for all into the body of the nation — endowed with one unified history, one language, one tradition, one destiny, and one loyalty. To make the leap, local or “purely ethnic” histories, languages, and traditions had to be effaced and forgotten under the direction of a sovereign state power, one and indivisible; loyalties hitherto disparate and multi-layered had therefore to converge on a single hearth and be harnessed to a single chariot, that of the nation-state. The emerging nation-state was to be the happy land of the identical: a clean house with no strangers inside. As this house rose on its foundations, and before it had reached the roof, the strangers had to cease being strangers — or they had to cease being.
For the spokesmen and would-be leaders of the nations-in-the-making could not trust the strangers. After all, being a Frenchman or Frenchwoman had the virtue of rendering them incapable of becoming good Germans; he or she was born French, and the definitive impossibility of revoking it set the act of being born apart from all others; once born French and raised as such, one would always be French. The strangers, by contrast, were and remained free to embrace or reject Frenchness or Germanness, and for that very reason one could not believe in the certainty — still less the finality — of the choice of one nationality or the other. Not a single one of their choices could be unsurpassable, let alone irrevocable, in such a way as to rule out other choices thereafter. Without meaning to, yet in an almost suicidal manner, the speaker Hannah Arendt remembered confirmed the worst suspicions of the good Frenchmen and Frenchwomen.
Even if it owed nothing to the speaker’s intention but everything to the logic of nation-state building, the assertion quoted by Hannah Arendt was a joke — a cruel joke, but only for those who took the deadly serious message of the budding nation-state full in the face. That message, or rather that injunction, was short and precise, leaving nothing to the imagination: assimilate! Cease to be what you are and become something altogether different. Cease to be a stranger: this demand already contained the impossibility of its own fulfilment, since, in the logic of nation-building, “to cease being a stranger” ultimately meant “to cease ever having been a stranger.” By such a logic, the rule “a stranger once is a stranger always” is the very essence of strangerhood. The act of being born “inside” would not have made you forever an insider of the nation, had those born “outside” not been condemned to remain forever outsiders. There was no shedding the stigma of not being native-born. Georg Simmel gave his famous definition of the stranger as the one who comes and does not leave. He might have added: and who does not cease being a stranger despite a decision and a permission to stay.
I repeat: the injunction to assimilate would not have turned into a cruel joke had it not been uttered by the spokesmen of the nations-in-the-making. Because it came from them, it became a joke of bloodthirsty, even potentially murderous, inspiration — which is exactly what happened, because for them the “nation” drew its greatest glory, its unwavering and inflexible authority, and its unrivalled appeal from the fact that it constituted a “home,” the exact opposite of a hotel or a campsite, and that it became the home of all those born within it — while being, at best, temporary lodging for everyone else.
To assimilate, a stranger had to wash himself clean of his strangerhood. But the strangerhood he was asked to wash away was a stain that would not come out, that resisted the strongest detergents: namely the taint of not being native-born (where the Jews were concerned, the popular slogan of the day was that not even a brimming pail of holy water could wash them clean of their Jewishness). It is no wonder that Lev Shestov, a Jew who first tried to become Russian and then French, turned to God as his last hope — but to a miracle-working God, a God equal to the exorbitant labour of confronting the impossible-to-satisfy demands the world addressed to mortals; a God powerful enough to erase the past, to obliterate what had been and turn it into something that never was. In short, a God whose greatness “was His inconsistency,”1 a God able to “cancel history” and make history “cease to exist”2 so as to let its victims live. Shestov’s God was that of a people commanded, goaded, compelled to confront and to accomplish (!) an impossible task. Such was the task that strangers faced under the injunction to “assimilate” — in reality, the very incarnation of the impossible.
A century or so before Shestov, Heinrich Heine did what he could to discharge that task: to “rid himself” of his Jewishness. Publicly and resoundingly, deploying all his remarkable gifts as a writer, he lent the most earnest support to the common conviction that “Jewishness” was a disease in need of radical treatment, and he renounced and disavowed the Jewish tradition — to which a great many of his brethren remained stubbornly attached — regarding it as the fossil of a past not only bygone but shameful; he used all his impertinent eloquence to mock and pillory the stereotypes of “specifically Jewish” qualities such as “physical clumsiness and want of grace,”3 the parvenu conduct of the newly rich Jews, the vulgarity of the Fresser (gluttons)4 who “scorned the loftiest flights of the spirit,” or the Jewish inability to communicate in German without polluting and disfiguring its beauty with the shocking ugliness of Yiddish.5 Heine ended up settling in France, in the hope (not, as it turned out, entirely unjustified) that it would be easier for him to pass as a German among the French — even as a plenipotentiary of the German Geist — whereas for the Germans, despite his exclusively German poetry, he was to remain irremediably Jewish, generation after generation.
Unlike Heine, Sigmund Freud never denied his Jewishness, though he never made of it a question or a problem demanding urgent attention. He proceeded with the lucid and resolute certainty that his work was at once an integral part of German learning and a contribution to “human science as such” — only to remark in the end that “his efforts to pass unnoticed merely drew attention to himself” and “that the very effort by which he hoped not to be recognised was precisely the one that identified him as a Jew.”6 It was perhaps Ludwig Börne, Heine’s contemporary, who first perceived the inevitable failure of the assimilatory enterprise when he observed that “some reproach me with being a Jew; others forgive me for being one; others still even congratulate me on being a Jew. But all of them are thinking about it.”7 A century later, another great German writer of the twentieth century, Jakob Wassermann, came to realise that, however hard he had tried to make his work not only unforgettable but also superbly and impeccably German, its very perfection was put down to his typically Jewish zeal, his careerism, his guile, his dissimulation, and his camouflage — as repugnant as they were treacherous.8
A few years after Wassermann had publicly confessed his terrifying discovery, the extraordinary historian and literary critic Artur Sandauer coined the concept of “allosemitism”9 (from allus, the Latin word for “other”), which referred to the practice, among non-Jews, of setting the Jews apart from everything else, as people radically different from any other, who therefore had to be described and understood through distinct concepts, but also treated in a special way in most social and cultural dealings — since the concepts and treatments used in confrontation or dealings with other persons or peoples simply did not apply in their case. “Allosemitism” is a fundamentally ambivalent attitude, capable of travelling the whole distance from love and respect to explicit condemnation and genocidal hatred — and it faithfully reflects the endemically ambivalent phenomenon of the “other,” the stranger (and hence of the Jew, the most radical incarnation, the very prototype, at least in Europe, of the stranger as such).
If you had the (mis)fortune of being cast onto the side of those who had to assimilate, there was no way out. Heads you lose, tails they win. However hard you strove to seem “one of them” as “naturally” as they were, you would only be told — and would understand later — that, contrary to what you had believed, it is on the contrary being “one of them” that defines “naturalness”; and that for this reason your very eagerness, your unfailing loyalty, and your devotion to the way of life you had adopted would be taken as symptoms of the falseness of your impersonations, and perhaps even of your premeditation. Hermann Cohen might present his neo-Kantianism as “the return to the original power of the essence of the German spirit,” and insist that “even where the Jewish faith is concerned,” we think, “we German Jews,”10 “in the spirit of Lessing and Herder, Leibniz and Kant, Schiller and Goethe”11 — all this came to nothing; or rather, it provoked responses opposite to those he had hoped for. Cohen’s call for the predestined symbiosis of “Jewishness” and “Germanness,” and for their future dissolution into the new universality — “human, all too human,” innocent of any national and religious parochialism (“however dynamic they may be, there are many social and intellectual forces at work in the historical Jewish and German cultures that can and must be used to advance as far and as fast as possible toward bringing about a cosmopolitan, humanist, and ethical society”12) — chimed well with the regular hosts and guests of the intellectual salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Mendelssohn, or Henriette Herz, when “Germanness” was defined as an aptitude for articulating ideas valid for “all humanity” and as an attitude of openness to “the universally human,” or with Georg Jellinek, Eduard Lasker, Eduard Gans, or Hugo Preuss, prophets and heralds of the school of rational law that traced German legal customs back to universal human reason — but Cohen’s love of universality made him unappealing to the ever-growing number of German patriots/nationalists who saw in it, and could see in it, nothing but the malicious sabotage of the arduous effort of national self-affirmation.
It was not without good reason that Cohen and those who shared his hopes regarded the universality of humanity as the only chance of success for the drive toward assimilation; after all, the pressure to assimilate was experienced as a pressure “to be like everyone else,” “to stop being odd, to give up one’s own identity” — which rang strangely like a call to take on and root out idiosyncrasies and to adopt a single model for all. But the assimilatory pressures of the nation-building era pointed in exactly the opposite direction — they tended not toward the effacement but toward the accentuation of differences between identities. Assimilation was a profoundly ambivalent idea, yet its intrinsic ambivalence appeared very differently depending on the pole from which one contemplated it — and the clash between the two incompatible viewpoints, experiences, and intentions was impossible to avoid.
Broadly speaking, the era of nation-building that gave rise to the “problem of assimilation” is over in most of the countries of Europe. There was, however, a further and horrible reason why the challenge, the glory, and the misery of assimilation ceased to be a problem for European Jews. That reason was the disappearance of the unique social, political, and cultural apparatus of Central Europe which, at the outset, gave Jewish assimilation its romantic allure and bore a large share of responsibility for its tragic fate. Until the last world war, Central and Eastern Europe was an inexhaustible reservoir of Ostjuden, the Jews of the shtetl and the ghetto — who, when they emigrated westward, where their more affluent and more enlightened co-religionists hoped to win quickly their struggle to be admitted into the societies of the homelands they had chosen, scratched open the half-healed wound of strangerhood and continually recharged, inflamed, and re-poisoned the “problem of assimilation,” leaving it perpetually unresolved and probably insoluble.
This part of Europe was also a veritable cauldron of so-called “natural” nations, aspiring or already budding, and of conflicting nationalist pressures and demands. Faced with the still-new tasks posited by the “primitive accumulation of legitimacy” of the emerging nation-states, and uncertain of their chances of survival, let alone of guaranteed success, the old and new nationalisms — spread across the whole multidimensionally heterogeneous mixture of populations — were particularly intolerant and brutal; this was all the more galling in that, in fact, practically none of their claims went uncontested. By giving themselves over to one or another of the conflicting nationalisms, populations were bound to set themselves against all its rivals; at the mercy of mutually incompatible demands while deprived of any prospective homeland that was denied them, they were condemned whatever their response to the pressures they might have considered and tried to put into practice. Their declarations of loyalty to one or another of the conflicting ethnic groups aspiring to nationhood doomed them to make more enemies than friends, while they could not even trust their friends, in so far as the latter always suspected the duplicity peculiar to the allegiance of new converts to their cause, liable to drop their allies once their goals were attained. Since, in such circumstances, no step along the road of assimilation was conclusive, no step toward assimilation could really be accepted as decisive proof of the converts’ loyalty by vigilant and suspicious examiners — and almost no verdict handed down by judges remained long uncontested — assimilation would have been an endless process; a task that not only lasted a whole lifetime but also covered the posthumous life of the accused, who were permanently liable to be retried.
Caught in a vice between territorial and cultural claims, the Jews were denied the prospect of a successful (final, ultimate, in-contestable) act of disappearance, elegantly called assimilation, even before they had surrendered to the terms set by the existing powers — willingly or by default. They had no means of reaching the goal they were urged to fight for — even with the utmost cunning and devotion. As the most perceptive among them, Gustav Mahler, would sooner or later discover, they were “thrice homeless: a Bohemian among the Austrians, an Austrian among the Germans, and a Jew everywhere.” The national claims were incompatible, and the Jews, those omnipresent, supra-national, wholly European strangers, exemplified that incompatibility more flagrantly than anyone else.
It is true that the aspiring nations were all too often eager to enlist the services of the Jews in pursuit of their proselytising crusades. The Jews represented Magyardom to the Slav peasants, they carried German culture to the Czechs of Prague, they were the prophets of the German Geist in the polyglot capital of the Habsburg empire, the allies of the Polish patriots struggling to wrest the affected peasants destined for future Polish citizenship from Russian or German control. One may suspect, however, that the Jews’ services were called on so readily precisely because these employees could easily be dismissed once their services were no longer needed. That is exactly what happened, as another perceptive Central and Eastern European, Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna, had prophesied: “Who created the German nationalist movement in Austria? The Jews. Who abandoned them and even despised them like dogs? The German nationalists. The same thing will happen with the socialists and the communists. Once the dinner is ready to be served, you will be driven from the table.”13
*
The distress of Central and Eastern European Jewry engendered a great deal of human misery, but it also, at the same time, made the episode of assimilation a period of unprecedented cultural creativity and spiritual discovery. And with the departure of the Jews of Eastern Europe, Jewish assimilation lost much of its former spirit — and its dramas.
Yet not every history of assimilation is tragic; and not all assimilation is creative. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case today — all the more so in that, across the whole Western world, the crusading spirit of nationalism dissipates into vague historical memories brushed up during independence commemorations or victory anniversaries that last a single day, week-long cricket matches, or the fortnight of football World Cups; and in that the do-it-yourself kits of identity caps and T-shirts, supplied by the shops and assembled by individuals, replace the blood-soaked flags and render superfluous the founding myths of common destiny, of blood, soil, and collective missions. The everyday life of assimilation tends to be tedious and is no source of inspiration. It engenders little suffering and certainly does not prompt iconoclasm or intellectual adventure. But with the end of the tragedy and the cruelty of politically inspired homogenisation, the character of cultural explosion that marked the assimilatory episode has likewise vanished.
For the great majority of Diaspora Jews, comfortably installed in the middle classes of their respective countries, “assimilation” means nothing more than keeping up with the Joneses. “Thou shalt not step sideways from thy neighbour”: such is the one commandment of assimilation that can easily be obeyed by “rushing out to buy a flag to make the street uniform,”14 in Cynthia Ozick’s caustic phrase. Nowadays assimilation has dissolved into a generalised conformism of public appearances that cohabit peacefully with an extraordinary variety of private contents. Overt conformism is all the easier to maintain in that diversity has been recognised as the most important of personal virtues, as a duty and a matter of pride. Amid the profusion of lifestyles — of class, of generation, of gender, of profession, or simply socially floating, deterritorialised, travelling by internet and freely leaping over every barrier — it is hard to single out the forms of life that are bound up with ethnicity, and therefore subject to manifestly different rules from those that govern other dimensions of diversity, as though they were particularly problematic and especially provocative. On the whole, it seems that attention is directed in a fairly undramatic way to the efforts made by wealthy Jewish residents of well-heeled streets to be “like” the rest of the wealthy residents, by Jewish youth to absorb and reproduce the latest lifestyles of the young already hooked on the fashion of the day, by Jewish professionals to live, dress, and decorate their offices in the latest manner deemed right and proper for professionals of their rank, by Jewish academics to act in accordance with the latest fads and manias on the rapidly changing campuses.
Assimilation has lost its sting, not because the Jews discharged perfectly the task it imposed, having accomplished what its homogenising pressures urged upon them — but because such pressures no longer exist: in the liquid-modern world of universal, fluid, and ephemeral particularities, a world integrated by common participation in the game of diversity, resigned to ambiguity and no longer striving for Eindeutigkeit15 or believing it attainable.
The social, political, and cultural success of the Jews in countries assured of their identity — countries no longer affected by the obsessions of nation-building and the hysterical protection of the nation — has today shattered the whole memory of the Jews’ socio-cultural achievements in Central and Eastern Europe, while provoking relatively little resentment and no measure of reprisal. According to David Biale’s calculations of 1986,16 for example, Jews made up 20.9% of the largest universities in the United States, 11.4% of the elite of government, business, and the trade unions, and 25.6% of the media. Let me stress that the media in question, a relatively recent invention, have made the Jews and their astonishing success more visible and more accessible to public scrutiny than ever before — which has nothing to do with the notorious rumours of the “jüdische Presse”17 that, about a century ago, put so many weapons and poisoned arrows into the hands of the leaders and ideologues of budding German nationalism.
In retrospect, one may say that the splendour and the misery of assimilation were a relatively brief and localised episode in the history of the modern world. They concerned only the few generations who passed through the turbulent but short period the modern states needed to secure the uniformity of their national interpretations — historically necessary but perhaps transitory. They concerned, too, only the few generations who had been hurled into the cauldron of seething nationalist passions; generations already cut off from their roots but not yet absorbed into the new mixture, and thereby forced to stretch to the utmost their talents, their inventiveness, and their pursuit of excellence in order to build for themselves a home that others around them enjoyed and regarded as their natural and unproblematic inheritance. It was of these generations that Kafka spoke as of a four-legged animal whose hind legs had already lost contact with the ground while its forelegs searched in vain for a place to land. The empty space, the non-place where these Menschen ohne Eigenschaften18 — more precisely, these people without recognised (and approved) social qualities — hung suspended, was experienced as a strange hotel set halfway between heaven and hell; the heaven of infinite chances of self-creation, the hell of perpetual contingency and irremediable incompleteness. For a few generations, the travellers obliged to take off toward a country where they had not yet the right to land could dwell nowhere else. The splendour and the misery of assimilation were confined to that brief flight over the no man’s land of non-identity in a world otherwise sharply divided into fenced-off properties, each marked with one and only one identity among so many others, pugnacious and quarrelsome.
Drawn and seduced by the flight, or forced to embark on it, the passengers — whether enthusiastic or envious — were easy targets and fair game for gamekeepers and poachers alike. But they also shared with other flying creatures the privilege of a broad and clear view, called — with more than a hint of admiration and jealousy — the “bird’s-eye view.”
The splendour of the “bird’s-eye view” had the same roots as the misery. As it developed, the game of assimilation proved extraordinarily fruitful, even if, in the end, it could not be won. Although, in Max Frisch’s terms, identity always and for everyone means “refusing to be what others want you to be,” the prescription of assimilation meant the denial of the right to refuse; one did not have that right, not in this game and not so long as the referees had the last word. The frustrated devotion of the candidates for assimilation kept turning into rebellion. The myth of belonging exploded, and the blinding light of the explosion drew out of its exilic shadow the truth of the mode of existence of the incomplete, fragile, and perpetually suspended traveller. To be in the world in the way one is chez soi19 could be attained only in another world — a world perhaps wholly different from the one that had sent the candidates for assimilation on the road of their involuntary and frustrating discovery.
One could seek this other world, as György Lukács attempted, in an authority courageous and powerful enough to dismiss the dominant judgements of the day and to proclaim its own judgement as if it were to become and remain the last; in the absolute and in-contestable authority of aesthetic perfection, for instance, or in the invincible power of the “historically inevitable” alliance between the suffering proletarians and the holders of universal truth. Or one could, on the contrary, like Walter Benjamin, seek consolation in the image of the “new angels created in countless throngs at every moment, who, having sung their hymn before God, cease to exist and vanish into nothingness,” and thus become, as Theodor Adorno rightly comments,20 one of the first thinkers to notice and to accept that “the thinking individual becomes intrinsically problematic, deprived nonetheless of the existence of anything supra-individual in which the isolated subject might gain a spiritual transcendence without being oppressed,” and without gaining either an immunity against that “horror of solitude” of which Gershom Scholem found proof in “many of Benjamin’s texts.”21
One may perhaps say that the more intransigent and brutal the assimilatory zeal of the would-be nation-builders and the self-appointed guardians of the nation, and the more clumsy the agents of conversion, the broader and more culturally vigorous life “on the far side of assimilation” tended to be. The episode of the astonishing cultural creativity of the Jews was born of misery and suffering, just as the universality of modern culture was born of the nauseating odour of parochialism. It was perhaps necessary, for those who took this thrust toward order, certainty, and uniformity full in the face, to suffer first in order to be able afterwards to see through the lie of privilege disguised as universality, and to learn to live with difference, ambivalence, contingency, and the infinity of possibilities teeming within the un-decidable being. In that case, the whipping post comes down through history as the crow’s nest from which land was first sighted at the far end of the long voyage of modernity.
It so happened — not necessarily by choice — that the Jews of Europe were the first to experience the painful dilemmas of modern life, its ineradicable ambivalence, and even its terrifying aporias — and that they thereby enjoyed the dubious privilege of being the first, those who perhaps most desired it, to try, to test, and to expose the lie of the whole spectrum of individual remedies and collective therapies that were supposed to soothe and detoxify them. From this site, where the contradictory pressures of the modern imperatives met and collided, the modern ambitions could be — and were — subjected to an experimentum crucis, explored, tested, and analysed. From this experience the vision of the contradictions and the dialectic of modern life was to be shaped. One is tempted to conclude that the drama of modern nation-building cast the European Jews in the role of pioneers of modern thought.
There are many reasons — to my mind compelling — to conjecture that herein lies the secret of what is generally regarded as the exceptionally creative contribution of the European Jews to modern culture, and above all to modern consciousness — and self-understanding. I also believe, however, that this unique creativity, like the drama of nation-building that gave it its first impulse and sustained its spirit for a century or two, was an episode of European history that is, generally, over today.
In that north-western peninsula of the Asian continent we call “Europe,” identity is no longer the front line along which constraint and freedom, imposition and choice, inclusion and exclusion face off in a war of attrition. In our part of the world, “identity” has become an “identainment”:22 from the domain of physical and spiritual survival it has passed into that of diverting recreational play, and has become the preoccupation and one of the chief pastimes of homo ludens rather than of homo politicus. It has also been largely privatised, extracted from the stage of “Politics” (with a capital P) to pass into the poorly structured and fleeting domain of individually conducted “life politics.” Like all the functions that have been, or can be, brought into this space, it too undergoes a rapid and total process of commercialisation. The play entitled “the search for identity” or “the construction of identity” is staged nowadays in various ways, covering the broad spectrum of theatrical genres from epic drama to farce or the grotesque, though productions in the tragic style are rather rare. And as the tragic versions become less and less epic, the Jewish presence in the culture of modernity loses much of that characteristic, and of the heroic flavour, that were its hallmarks in the era of the Jewish awakening into modernity.
If having been forced to fight to keep one’s identity alive, and having borne the full brunt of all the contradictions and inanities of ambivalence and of the interplay between continuities and discontinuities, was a differentia specifica of the Jews on a continent obsessed with the self-affirmation of nations, then all the inhabitants of the planet of diasporas, whether they know it or not, whether they like the news or loathe it, are Jews.
Andrzej Stasiuk, an extraordinary Polish novelist and perceptive analyst of the contemporary human condition, suggests that “the possibility of becoming someone else” is today’s substitute for the redemption now largely cleared away and no longer cared about. “It is highly probable,” he proposes, “that the number of digital, celluloid, and analogue beings encountered during physical life approaches the volume that eternal life and the resurrection of the body could offer.” By applying all manner of techniques, we can change our bodies and reshape them according to different models. Leafing through the glossy magazines, one has the impression that, most of the time, they tell only one story — the ways in which someone can remake their personality, beginning with diets, ambiances, and houses, and going as far as the reconstruction of the psychic structure, which goes by the code name: “be yourself.”
Sławomir Mrożek, a world-renowned Polish writer with first-hand experience of many countries and cultures, compares our world to a market stall full of beautiful dresses and surrounded by crowds searching for their “self.” One can change dresses indefinitely, so that the searchers can enjoy a marvellous freedom forever. Let us search for our true “selves”; it is tremendously funny — provided one never finds the true one. For if one did, the fun would be over.
If happiness is perpetually within reach, and if attaining it takes only the few minutes one needs to leaf through the yellow pages and pull one’s credit card from one’s wallet, then a self that holds back from the search for happiness obviously cannot be the “true” one — it is not really the one that prompted the seeker of self to embark on the voyage of self-discovery. Such a fraudulent self must be discarded for “inauthenticity,” while the search for the true self must go on. And there is little reason to stop searching for it if one can be sure that, in a moment, yet another moment will arrive, bearing new promises and bursting in with new possibilities.
Translated from English by Martine Leibovici
Notes
Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin, Athens: Ohio University Press 1966, p. 69.↩︎
Ibid., p. 68.↩︎
In French in the text.↩︎
Cf. Siegbert Salomon Prawer, Heine’s Jewish Comedy. A Study of His Portraits of Jews and Judaism, Oxford University Press 1986, pp. 760–1.↩︎
In German in the text.↩︎
Marthe Robert, From Oedipus to Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity, New York: Anchor Books 1976, p. 17.↩︎
Quoted by Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred; Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews, Johns Hopkins University Press 1986, p. 162.↩︎
Cf. Jakob Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew, trans. S. N. Brainin, London: Allen and Unwin 1934, p. 72.↩︎
Cf. Artur Sandauer, “O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku; Rzecz, którą nie ja powinienem był napisać” (On the situation of the Polish writer of Jewish origin in the twentieth century; an article I should not have been the one to write), in Pisma Zebrane (Collected Works), vol. 3, Czytelnik 1985.↩︎
In French in the text.↩︎
Cf. David Baumgardt, “The Ethics of Lazarus and Steinthal,” in Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 2, pp. 213–4.↩︎
Cf. Steven S. Schwarzschild, “Germanness and Judaism: Hermann Cohen’s Normative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis,” in Jews and Germans from 1860 to 1933. The Problematic Symbiosis, ed. David Bronsen, Heidelberg 1979.↩︎
Quoted by Michael Ignatieff, “The Rise and Fall of Vienna’s Jews,” New York Review of Books, 29 June 1989, p. 22.↩︎
Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor, New York: Dutton 1984, p. 159.↩︎
In German in the text: univocity.↩︎
Cf. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History, New York: Schocken Books 1986, p. 180.↩︎
In German in the text: Jewish press.↩︎
In German in the text: men without qualities.↩︎
In French in the text.↩︎
Theodor W. Adorno, “Introduction” to On Walter Benjamin. Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith, Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1988, p. 14.↩︎
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. H. Zohn, London: Faber & Faber 1982, p. 234.↩︎
An untranslatable pun formed from the words identity and entertainment (Translator’s note).↩︎