When I was a student at the Hebrew University in the 1980s, I often heard older professors ask half-jokingly: “So, what is the second most important language for Jewish studies?” The answer was Hebrew. The most important one, of course, was German—as most of the significant nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature of Wissenschaft des Judentums was written in German.

Marc Volovici's important study could have been entitled “German as a Jewish Language”—but as he makes clear, after the 1930s, this language which once had been identified with so many Jewish endeavors had become a Jewish problem. The language of Goethe was now branded as the language of Goebbels. The language was identified with hashmadah rather than with haskalah. As time passed, the attempts to reclaim German as a Jewish language could be heard again. When Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke in German in the Knesset in 2008, right-wing Israeli politician Arieh Eldad objected by pointing to the fact that this was the language “in which my grandfather and grandmother were murdered.” He was countered by former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, who claimed it was also “the language in which Herzl wrote.” He concluded: “Languages are not guilty, only those speaking them.”

Volovici begins his thorough analysis of the love-and-hate affair between the Jews and the German language with the Enlightenment. It was the Maskilim's resistance to the Jargon (as they denounced Yiddish), and their followers’ inability to read Hebrew well enough, which opened the door to the use of German as the new language of educated Jews. Moses Mendelssohn's Bible translation initially still had to be printed in Hebrew letters, as most German Jews were not able to read other characters. Not only the early Haskalah but also the Reform movement was initially largely a German-speaking project. German was used as the language of religious reform not only in Germany itself but also in nineteenth-century America, where many synagogue sermons were delivered in German and Jewish periodicals appeared in German.

Soon, German was vilified by some Yiddish-speaking east European Jews as the language of assimilation. What an irony that it would also become the language identified with the new Jewish national movement, Zionism. Not only German Jews like Moses Hess wrote their early Zionist writings in German, but the most important Zionist pamphlet before Herzl's Judenstaat, Leon Pinsker's Selbstemanzipation, was written in German despite the Russian Jewish identity of its author. With the emergence of Herzl on the political stage, official Zionist leadership was firmly in the hand of German speakers. The new movement's journal appeared in German, and the lingua franca at the Zionist congresses was, if not pure German, then Kongressdeutsch.

Instead of trying to define what Kongressdeutsch is, Volovici is absolutely right in telling his readers why he would rather not define it: “The fact that Kongressdeutsch could not be easily defined was one of its main sources of practicality, allowing participants of the congress to transcend some of the political sensitivities involved in making language choice” (199). One of the most fascinating chapters in the book deals with the gap between theoretical and practical usage of Hebrew by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. While both translated the Hebrew Bible into German, they struggled with spoken Hebrew. This was a greater dilemma for the Zionist Buber, who confessed to Gershom Scholem: “I believe I have a right to say that ‘I know’ Hebrew, but as soon as I want to express a thought, it crumbles in my mouth” (160). For the non-Zionist Rosenzweig, Hebrew remained a holy tongue. Both Buber and Rosenzweig continued to express themselves in German—and the Hebraized German of their Bible translation.

It was a long way from Kongressdeutsch and Bibeldeutsch to the role of German in postwar Israel. The country that issued passports valid for all countries with the exception of Germany also tried to ban the German language in public use. Already in Mandate Palestine, some activists were not satisfied with the peaceful protests against the language of Hitler, but went so far as to destroy the editorial offices of Arnold Zweig's German-language journal Orient. After the establishment of the state, there were enervating discussions about the performances of Gustav Mahler's lyrics or of a German Jewish actor who had fled Nazi Germany. The minister of the interior, Moshe Shapiro, would not allow any presentation in German, even though Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett reminded him that German after all was the official language of a friendly country. He meant, of course, Switzerland. Volovici describes the awkward situation that arose when German and Israeli negotiators met to discuss matters of restitution in the early 1950s. The Israelis at the table were all native German speakers, but they had clear instructions from their government only to speak in English or through an interpreter with the Germans. In the end, it was the Eichmann trial that brought spoken German back into the public, when the words of the Nazi criminal and his defender, but also those of many witnesses, were heard on radios across the country.

Volovici provides a complex picture of the language of Heine and Hitler, of Goethe and Goebbels. German was not always a Jewish problem, but it was a language without which modern Jewish history, in its best and in its worst times, cannot be imagined. Thus, this book provides important keys of understanding both to modern Jewish history and to modern German culture.