The "Jewish Question" in German Literature, 1749-1939 Emancipation and Its Discontents

by Robertson, Ritchie

• ISBN13: 9780199248889
• ISBN10: 0199248885
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This book is an erudite literary study of the uneasy position of the Jews in Germany and Austria from the first pleas for Jewish emancipation during the Enlightenment to the eve of the Holocaust. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts, Ritchie Robertson offers a close examination of attempts to construct a Jewish identity suitable for an increasingly secular world. No other study by a single author deals with German-Jewish relations so comprehensively and over such a long period of literary history.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Enlightenment

German Jewry before Emancipation

How the Enlightenment saw the Jews

Lessing and Toleration

Emancipation: Dohm versus Humboldt

Moses Mendelssohn and the Rational Jew Mendelssohns Legacy

Liberalism

Jews and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century

Schnitzler: Liberalism and Irony

The European Humanism of Stefan Zweig

Freud: Science versus Religion

Antisemitism

Varieties of Antisemitism

Literary Images of the Jew

Assimilation

The Meaning of Assimilation

Self-Hatred

Hyperacculturation

Dissimilation

The Jewish Renaissance

The Eastern Jews

The Jew as Oriental

Zionism

Abbreviations

Select Bibliography

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