Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

EDITED BY Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity

Jonathan M. Hess

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professorship in Jewish History and Culture, College of Arts and Sciences, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Portions of Chapter 2 were published previously in Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German-Jewish Ghetto Fiction, Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 576–615. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as Fictions of Modern Orthodoxy, 1857–1890: Orthodoxy and the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 52 (2007): 49–86. Reprinted with the permission of the Leo Baeck Institute.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hess, Jonathan M., 1965–

Middlebrow literature and the making of German-Jewish identity / Jonathan M. Hess.

p. cm.—(Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780804774239

1. German literature—Jewish authors—History and criticism. 2. German fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Jewish fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Jews—Germany—Intellectual life—19th century. 5. Group identity in literature. 6. Jews in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.

PT169.H47 2010

833’.7098924—dc22

2009030703

To Beth, Rebecca, Lily, and Amelia

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Table of Figures

Introduction - When Rabbis Became Novelists: The Emergence of Jewish Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany

One - Under the Sword of the Spanish Inquisition: The Sephardic Legacy and the Making of Middlebrow Classics

Two - Leopold Kompert and the Pleasures of Nostalgia: Ghetto Fiction and the Creation of a Usable Past

Three - Middlebrow Culture in Pursuit of Romance: Love, Fiction, and the Virtues of Marrying In

Four - Middlebrow Fiction and the Making of Modern Orthodoxy

Concluding Remarks

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Twenty years ago, when I was in graduate school grappling with the development of German aesthetic thought, it would never have occurred to me that I would someday spend years of my professional life working on a book on hundreds of works of literature that for the most part went entirely under the radar of the literary elites of their era. In retrospect, of course, the trajectory of my scholarly career seems less puzzling. This is largely because I have been fortunate to spend the last sixteen years at an institution which has allowed and encouraged my research and teaching to develop in continually new ways. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I thus owe a tremendous debt to my colleagues in the department of Germanic languages and literatures for creating such a productive, pleasant, and friendly environment in which to teach, work, think, and conduct research. Ruth von Bernuth, Eric Downing, Clayton Koelb, Dick Langston, Anna Parkinson, Kathryn Starkey, and Tin Wegel all deserve to be singled out here. Eric Downing was particularly giving of his time, expertise, and good advice on this project, and his encouragement and critical readings of chapters in draft form were instrumental in enabling me to feel at home writing about the nineteenth century. I owe a similar level of gratitude to my colleagues down the road in the department of Germanic languages and literatures at Duke University. Bill Donahue and Ann Marie Rasmussen both showed tremendous generosity of spirit, time, and critical energy in their responses to my work and in numerous conversations about it, and I thank them as well.

I have also profited from my students in important ways. The more than two hundred undergraduates in my lecture course on German Culture and the Jewish Question cannot be thanked individually, but the challenge of teaching this class brought my thinking about the issues I explore in this book to a new level of clarity. (And perhaps now my students may understand why they were forced to read Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen in an antiquated nineteenth-century translation.) The graduate students in a seminar on the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel helped me to zone in on some of the issues I investigate here. I also had the occasion to refine my thinking about the historical novel and the ghetto tale while teaching a graduate seminar on cultures of memory in nineteenth-century Germany. I owe all the graduate students in my department a special thank-you for their intellectual engagement and curiosity and for helping to make our department a place where new ideas are always in the works.

I wrote this book while helping to build a new center for Jewish Studies in Chapel Hill, and the experience of trying to create meaningful institutional avenues for interdisciplinary work on campus has also left an important mark on my scholarship. My colleagues in the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies—particularly Yaakov Ariel, Jonathan Boyarin, Chris Browning, Erin Carlston, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Jodi Magness, Evyatar Marienberg, and Yaron Shemer—all deserve thanks for their part in creating a vibrant interdisciplinary community where scholarship such as my own has been able to take on new meaning. As invigorating as creating a new program can be, this book would not have been completed without significant release time from teaching and administrative work. I thus owe a special debt to the College of Arts and Sciences for making it possible for me to devote the academic year 2006–2007 entirely to research and writing. In spring 2007 I was particularly fortunate to be a Borden Fellow at the Institute of Arts and Humanities on campus. Julia T. Wood and my colleagues in the dynamic and invigorating faculty seminar gave tremendous feedback on my project at a crucial stage, and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to spend that semester engaged in intellectual exchange with such a gifted group of colleagues from my own institution.

While working on this book, I presented sections of my argument in a variety of public venues. I gave lectures at the University of Miami at Ohio, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Georgia, Ben Gurion University, and Princeton University and served on numerous panels at the annual meetings of the German Studies Association and the Association for Jewish Studies. I have profited enormously from the comments, criticisms, and suggestions made by friends and strangers alike in such settings. Back in North Carolina, presentations at the Carolina-Duke German Studies Works in Progress Colloquium and the North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series gave me opportunities to engage in sustained discussion of my work with colleagues closer to home.

One of the most gratifying aspects of working on this project has been the wonderful network of fellow scholars working on German-Jewish literature and culture that I have been so fortunate to be connected to. Certainly, this too was not a development I would have predicted twenty years ago, and it has been a special pleasure for me to pursue this project in such rich and rewarding dialogue with a quickly growing circle of friends and colleagues. Early on in the project, I got crucial criticism and feedback from David Brenner, Bill Donahue, Eric Downing, Katja Garloff, Jeff Grossman, Sven-Erik Rose, Till van Rahden, and Jonathan Skolnik. In many ways I developed the overall structure and argument of this book in dialogue with their comments. Discussions and exchanges with Steve Aschheim, Richard Benson, Ruth von Bernuth, Shmuel Feiner, Abigail Gillman, Sander Gilman, Martha Helfer, Susannah Heschel, Eva Lezzi, Elizabeth Loentz, Leslie Morris, Derek Penslar, Todd Presner, Laurence Roth, Karin Schutjer, Michael K. Silber, Scott Spector, Nadia Valman, Liliane Weissberg, and George Williamson all shaped the project in important ways. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Bill Donahue and Martha Helfer for inviting me to discuss a draft of my introduction at the German and Jewish Studies Workshop at Duke University in February 2009. I feel much more confident about the version of the project that went to print than I would have without the chance to discuss my work in such detail with such a remarkable group of colleagues and fellow-travelers in the world of German-Jewish literature and culture.

For the last three years, the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin term professorship in Jewish history and culture has provided invaluable research support. I have also incurred significant debts to the interlibrary loan librarians at Davis library at UNC, and to the library staff at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, where I spent a week in late 2007. Several years ago my former graduate student Ed Potter at Mississippi State University helped me get my hands on a copy of Rahel Meyer’s hard-to-find 1853 novel Zwei Schwestern. When Ed reads Chapter 3, I trust he will see that he truly made a difference.

At Stanford University Press I have had an exemplary editor in Norris Pope, and it has truly been a pleasure to work with him at all stages of this project. Maurice Samuels read the manuscript for the Press and gave me tremendous feedback and extremely helpful criticisms and suggestions for revision. I thank Maurie for the enthusiasm he brought to this project and subsequently for numerous productive and illuminating conversations about his work and my own. I would be remiss if I did not also express my gratitude to Steve Zipperstein and Aron Rodrigue for their interest in and support of this project. Sarah Crane Newman and Tim Roberts proved extremely helpful in guiding the manuscript through production, and Richard Gunde deserves thanks for his expert copyediting.

Last but certainly not least, I need to thank my family. I dedicate this book to my wife Beth and our three daughters, Rebecca, Lily, and Amelia. Beth may not realize it but she provided a productive sounding board for many of the book’s ideas even as they were discussed in 30–second conversations that took place amid all the other busy activities that make up our home life. And her love, support, and presence were even more important in enabling me to write this book and do everything else I do. Rebecca, ever the avid reader, refused to read an English translation of Marcus Lehmann’s Die Familie Υ Aguillar even when I made this lucrative for her. Nevertheless, the intense love of reading, books, and fiction that she shares with her two sisters gave me a constant reminder of what can be so special about literature, why people are drawn to fiction, and the powerful role that reading fiction can play in the way we fashion our identities on a day-to-day level.

Portions of Chapter 2 were published previously in Leopold Kompert and the Work of Nostalgia: The Cultural Capital of German-Jewish Ghetto Fiction, Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 576–615. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as Fictions of Modern Orthodoxy, 1857–1890: Orthodoxy and the Quest for the German-Jewish Novel, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 52 (2007): 49–86. I thank the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Leo Baeck Institute respectively for permission to reuse this material here.

Table of Figures

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Introduction

When Rabbis Became Novelists: The Emergence of Jewish Literature in Nineteenth-Century Germany

For many in the academy today, defining what Jewish literature is represents a difficult if not impossible undertaking. Does this term refer simply to literature written by Jews? Or does it include literature written about Jews? Is it limited to literature that is produced for a Jewish readership, or can it be literature that is read primarily by non-Jews? Does literature need to be written in a Jewish language such as Yiddish, Hebrew, or Ladino to qualify as Jewish literature, or can literature in English, French, or Arabic also be considered Jewish literature? If we consider that the terms Jewish and literature each mean different things to different groups of people at different times, determining what Jewish literature is may become even more a case of defining the indefinable.¹ To be sure, many people would classify Sholem Aleichem, Philip Roth, and S. Y. Agnon as classic Jewish writers. What, though, about Franz Kafka? What about Marcel Proust? And perhaps most importantly, why do we need this category at all? What do we stand to gain from grouping disparate texts together under a rubric of Jewish literature that few of their authors would have used to categorize their works?

By beginning with these reflections, I want to underscore a difference between the academic world we inhabit today and a pivotal moment in the nineteenth century when something new called Jewish literature began to appear on the scene. Jews in Europe enjoyed reading fictional texts long before the ideals of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and internal Jewish reform efforts helped unleash those dramatic transformations in the structures of traditional Jewish life that Jewish historians typically identify with modernity. From the sixteenth century on, Central and Eastern European Jewish culture favored Torah and Talmud study and privileged Hebrew literacy at the same time as it allowed for the development of a rich tradition of epics, romances, legends, fables, and chapbooks written in Yiddish, many of which survived well into the nineteenth century.² Long before the modern era, Yiddish literature had become a fixture in the Ashkenazi world, sanctioned reading material for women that was doubtlessly enjoyed by men as well, if only as a guilty pleasure acknowledged to occupy a lower cultural plane than the sacred texts men were commanded to study. For Jews in the German lands and many parts of the Austrian Empire in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, nevertheless, something new began to happen. Following the example of eighteenth-century Jewish pioneers such as Moses Mendelssohn and nineteenth-century government initiatives seeking to promote greater integration, Jews in large numbers began to give up Yiddish and adopt German as the preferred language of daily life.³ During the nineteenth century, German Jews experienced an unprecedented level of social, geographical, and economic mobility. Surrounded by new opportunities, Jews began attending German-language schools, abandoning traditionally Jewish professions such as peddling and petty trading, and adopting the mores and behavioral norms of bourgeois culture. As Jews moved into new worlds and fashioned new identities for themselves as Germans, as Europeans, as members of the middle class, and as Jews, they encountered a rapidly expanding German-language book market, a dizzying world of lending libraries and book-traders supplying a quickly growing reading public with a seemingly constant source of newspapers, journals, novels, plays, and serialized fiction.

Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, the celebrated painter of nineteenth-century German Jewry, captured this dynamic in his 1866 painting Sabbath-Ruhe (Sabbath Rest), one of the twenty images in his frequently reprinted collection, Bilder aus dem altjüdischen Familienleben (Pictures of Traditional Jewish Family Life) (Figure 1). Oppenheim here portrays an elderly woman in a Jewish quarter hunched over what seems to be the Tsene-rene, the traditional Yiddish women’s Bible. The woman sits next to her son and her young grandson, neither of whom is reading on the Sabbath, even though the young boy holds a book in his arm, which judging by its bookmarks is a text he is studying. Inside the home at the edge of the image, however, something else is happening. A young woman sits alone, in fashionable dress, surrounded by an almost magical light as she is absorbed reading a small, modernlooking book. Oppenheim’s portrait of the young woman is reminiscent of eighteenth-century paintings such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s A Young Girl Reading (c. 1776) (Figure 2) and clearly evokes the huge popularity that novel-reading enjoyed from the eighteenth century on, particularly among women. As Leopold Stein, a leading reform rabbi, noted in the commentary that was often published along with Oppenheim’s prints in the nineteenth century, the number on the door frame fatefully sets the painting in 1789, the year of the French Revolution.⁴ In the vision of the past created by this painting, Stein comments, the modern age comes to traditional Jewish life not from without but from within, through magical encounters with new forms of literature, through windows opened up by Jewish women’s traditional penchant for reading in the vernacular.⁵

Figure 1. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Sabbath-Ruhe auf der Gasse, 1866. Gift of the Oscar and Regina Gruss Charitable and Educational Foundation, Inc., 1999–86. Photo by John Parnell. Photo credit: The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, NY.

In the year of dramatic transformation that Oppenheim tries to capture in his painting, there would have been little doubt what our young woman was reading. Stein assumes that the young lady is reading German literature. Given the prominence of best-selling novels such as Sophie von La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sternheim, 1771) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) on the international book market in the late eighteenth century, this certainly seems plausible. Yet Oppenheim’s portraits, with their visions of traditional Jewish families embodying middle-class virtues, are notorious for strategically blurring the world for which he painted and the lost world he sought to capture in his art (Figure 3).⁶ In this sense, for its Jewish viewers in 1866 and afterward, Sabbath-Ruhe may have summoned up a different set of associations. Oppenheim himself claimed that the literary genre of the ghetto tale that Leopold Kompert did so much to popularize starting with his breakout volume Aus dem Ghetto (From the Ghetto, 1848) was one of the sources of inspiration for his idyllic portraits of traditional Jewish life.⁷ By the time Oppenheim produced Sabbath-Ruhe and most of his other images of traditional Jewry in the 1860s, Kompert and other authors had produced numerous volumes of ghetto tales, and German Jews were doing much more than reading the same types of German and European literature that their non-Jewish neighbors were enjoying. In this period when Jews were rapidly ascending into the ranks of the middle classes, undertaking projects of religious modernization, and engaging with the secular world in ways their medieval ancestors could not have fathomed, Jews also launched their own form of secular culture: fiction written by Jews for Jews that, like Oppenheim’s prints, also sought to navigate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish history and the German present, and between the fading walls of the ghetto and the promise of a new cultural identity as members of a German bourgeoisie. It is this literature that is the subject of this book.

Figure 2. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Young Girl Reading, c. 1776. Gift of Mrs. Mellon Bruce in memory of her father, Andrew W. Mellon. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The institution that made it possible for this literature to be so widely disseminated was the German-language Jewish press. By the 1860s, the German-Jewish press had mushroomed from its modest beginnings with David Fränkel and Joseph Wolf’s journal Sulamith (1806–1848) into a diverse menu of options including newspapers, journals, yearbooks, and other print media, many of which appealed to readers across Central and Eastern Europe, and some of which drew subscribers from North America and elsewhere.⁸ Many periodicals, including Sulamith, had ceased publication by this time, but they had been quickly replaced by others, many of which did survive the test of time. By far the most prominent among these was the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums (Universal Jewish Newspaper), a newspaper launched in 1837 by Ludwig Philippson, a liberal rabbi and moderate reformer in the city of Magdeburg. Appearing biweekly or weekly, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums continued publication until 1922, when it was absorbed by the paper of German Jewry’s most significant organization, the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Despite announcing on the cover page of every issue that it was a non-partisan organ for all Jewish interests, Philippson’s newspaper proved not to be everyone’s cup of tea. By the mid-1860s, it had two major competitors among the increasingly vocal minority that came to characterize itself as orthodox. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the Frankfurt am Main rabbi who was the towering figure of German-Jewish orthodoxy, began editing Jeschurun, a monthly journal geared at promoting Jewish spirit and Jewish life in the home, community and school, in 1854. In 1860, Marcus Lehmann, a rabbi in Mainz, founded Der Israelit as a central organ for orthodox Judaism, creating a weekly (and sometimes biweekly) newspaper that absorbed Jeschurun in the 1880s and continued publication until it was shut down by the Nazis in 1938.

There were also competitors who targeted a similar audience as the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, such as the Viennese Kalendar und Jahrbuch für Israeliten (Calendar and Yearbook for Israelites, 1842–1868), a Jewish almanac that Kompert coedited for some time, or the short-lived Der Freitagabend, eine Familienschrift (Friday Evening, A Family Journal), which Leopold Stein launched along with fellow reform rabbi Salomon Formstecher in 1859. Philippson himself, a tireless publicist, was also the force behind numerous other initiatives, including the Jüdisches Volksblatt (Jewish Popular Paper, 1853–1866), and the first major modern Jewish book club, the Institut zur Förderung der israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the Promotion of Israelite Literature). Administered by Philippson, Adolf Jellinek, and Isaac Jost, the Institut played a pivotal role in making the Jewish book a staple of modern Jewish life, placing 200,000 copies of its fifty-five titles in libraries and private collections across Europe and the United States between 1855 and 1873.⁹

Figure 3. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, Das Laubhütten-Fest, 1867. Gift of the Oscar and Regina Gruss Charitable and Educational Foundation, Inc., 1999–92. Photo by Richard Hori. Photo Credit: The Jewish Museum, New York / Art Resource, NY. Oppenheim’s paintings of Jewish life often featured traditional Jewish families embodying middle-class virtues. In idylls of bourgeois family life such as Das Laubhütten-Fest, we find a prosperous family celebrating Sukkot as non-Jewish children watch with curiosity and admiration.

In the nineteenth century, the phrase Jewish literature was often a slippery one. At times it was still reserved for rabbinic commentary. At other times it was used to refer to a variety of types of writing, including works of Jewish history such as Heinrich Graetz’s multivolume Geschichte der Juden (History of the Jews, 1853–1870), which the Institut helped transform into a cornerstone of Jewish library collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Among all their other projects, however, Jewish print media devoted considerable efforts to disseminating one specific type of Jewish literature, which they generally termed Jewish Belletristik. The German term Belletristik had been introduced more than a century earlier to translate the French belles lettres. In theory Jewish belles lettres could refer to essays, poetry, drama, fiction, and other reading material that was neither designed strictly for specialists nor meant to be consumed merely for entertainment. In the world of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish press, however, belles lettres typically came to mean prose fiction: novels, novellas, and short stories that were written with a distinctly Jewish readership in mind. More than a dozen of the Institut’s fifty-five titles ended up being works of Jewish belles lettres, and from the beginning, Philippson’s Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums played an important role promoting the development of this type of Jewish literature. From May to October of its first year of publication, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums delivered its readers installments of Philippson’s brother Phöbus’s Die Marannen (The Marranos), a historical romance about Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition that met with an eager reading public. Following this model, Jewish newspapers and journals often serialized fiction in Feuilleton or arts and culture sections much like those of other German newspapers of their day. In subsequent decades, Philippson’s paper and its competitors delivered literally hundreds of historical novels, ghetto tales, and novels and novellas of contemporary Jewish life to Jews across Central Europe and beyond.¹⁰

For the nineteenth-century intellectual elites who presided over these networks of newspapers, journals, and book series that helped create a new sense of collective belonging for Jews throughout the German-speaking world, defining what Jewish belles lettres was proved far less interesting than ensuring that their readers had constant access to a steady stream of prose fiction that was explicitly Jewish in content. German-speaking Jews were neither the first nor the only Jews in modern Europe to produce Jewish literature in this fashion. Later in the century, the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums would celebrate Phöbus Philippson’s Die Marannen as the beginning of the entirety of modern Jewish belles lettres.¹¹ As Maurice Samuels has argued in his pioneering study of French-Jewish writers in the nineteenth century, however, Jews in France were actually a few years ahead of their German coreligionists. ¹² Tellingly, the second major piece of prose fiction published by the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums was a translation of a novella by French-Jewish writer Eugénie Foa, and Philippson’s paper published numerous translations of literary material from French-Jewish periodicals in its first several years.¹³ Elsewhere in Europe, in the Ottoman Empire, Ladino newspapers in the 1840s were already dominated by novels and novellas, many of which were creative adaptations of foreign material, particularly French and Hebrew sources.¹⁴ In England, writers such as Grace Aguilar also published innovative forms of Jewish fiction several years before the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums published Philippson’s novella.¹⁵

Whether or not German-speaking Jews were the first to produce Jewish literature in nineteenth-century Europe, the writers I study in this book wrote fiction that quickly became a fixture of Jewish life, and not just in areas where Jews came to adopt German as their native language. Studies of Jewish literature today often focus on Hebrew, Yiddish, and American writers, concentrating their energies on traditions that often do not get pushed back much before the 1880s, when authors such as S. Y. Abramovitsh, writing under the pen name Mendele Mocher Sforim, began to put Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature on the map in new ways.¹⁶ Few if any of the works I discuss in this book will be familiar to students of modern Jewish literature, and apart from Kompert’s ghetto tales and the occasional historical novel, few managed to appeal to non-Jews when they were written. Within the Jewish world in the nineteenth century and beyond, however, this body of fiction written in German and designed in large part for a Jewish audience enjoyed considerable longevity. The historical fiction I study in Chapter 1 was frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century and translated into Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Ladino, and numerous other languages, enjoying a particularly long shelf life in pre-state Palestine and the modern state of Israel.¹⁷ In Chapter 2, when we consider the reception of Kompert’s ghetto tales, we shall discover a similarly vibrant tradition inside and outside the German-speaking world. The tradition of German-Jewish orthodox belles lettres that starts in the 1860s and that I consider in Chapter 4 rarely managed to capture the attention of anyone other than the orthodox. Within this camp, however, these texts too have endured the test of time, in German, Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, and many are still available today.

The main question we need to put to this body of fiction written by Jews for Jews in the nineteenth-century German world is not what Jewish literature is. We want to ask, instead, what it did for its readers, how this literature enabled Jews to balance the multiple identities they had to contend with in a world in which questions as to who they were, what they did for a living, what they read, or who they would marry were no longer determined by the institutions of traditional Jewish life in the same way they had been in previous generations. It is in this context that our foray into German-Jewish romance fiction in Chapter 3—a genre that neither had a long shelf life nor inspired any direct imitators—becomes so crucial for understanding the more general way in which German-Jewish literature sought to use belles lettres to revitalize Jewish community and create distinctly Jewish fantasies about romantic love and bourgeois family life. A comprehensive, transnational history of Jewish literature before 1900 remains a project for the future, albeit one to which the present book seeks to make a crucial contribution. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity locates in the nineteenth-century German-speaking world a formative moment of the modern Jewish experience, exploring one of the many different national contexts in which Jewish identity became a phenomenon that was mediated by literature and culture, and not just, or not even primarily, religious tradition.

From radical reformers to the modern orthodox, we shall see, German Jews increasingly invested literature that was secular in form with the task of promoting lifelong commitments to Judaism. In this way, fiction that was marketed toward men, women, and adolescents alike rapidly achieved a level of prominence and respectability that just a generation before would have been unthinkable in a culture that had traditionally privileged men’s study of sacred texts. Middlebrow Literature and the Making of German-Jewish Identity studies the ways in which fiction came to assume an unprecedented role in shaping Jewish identity during this period. Just as importantly, it also explores how German-Jewish literature helped launch a tradition of modern Jewish belles lettres that is in many ways still with us today. In 1789, the year that